SAGA OF A FLAGWOMAN

The death of Yvonne Smith, known far and wide as ÒBubulupsÓ, 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 paupersÕ 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 ÒTepooÓ 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 sheÕd
lost weight she wouldnÕt have displaced much less than 250 pounds, and the hospital attendant
laughed at this beached whale on the floor.

ÒIn my day he woulda be crying,Ó 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 Òabdominal malignancyÓ
and ÒanaemiaÓ, 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, ÒPinheadÓ 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. ÒShe was an ordinary girl but always miserable, always big and she didn't take nothing
from nobody,Ó recalls Wellington ÒBluesÓ 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.

ÒIs I break she out in life,Ó admits George Blackman. He used to ride his bicycle past her house
every day and look in the window where she practised piano. ÒShe 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.Ó

From that first liaison she became pregnant and fled or was chased away from her
ÒrespectableÓ family, just as happened to her younger friend ÒJean-in-townÓ Clarke.

ÒI 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,Ó recalls Jean-in-
town. ÒI stand up on George Street looking for friends the first night and both of us became friends.Ó
 Similarly, Bubulups had gone years before to live with ÒfriendsÓ 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 couldnÕt 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.

ÒShe went on the streets for company; she had alot of young girlfriends, and young girls like
money,Ó 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 sheÕd entered, thoughÑmaybe by then she wouldnÕt
have accepted his help. Instead she joined the world of steelband badjohns and saga boys. For some
time she hung out in the ÒBig YardÓ 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.

ÒBubulups with a flag in she hand,Ó goes one calypso, possibly by Spoiler, Òbeggin the police
don't stop the band.Ó Even the most fearless men, such as Carlton ÒZigileeÓ Barrow from Bar 20, found
it daunting to keep up with Bubulups when she led them into battle. ÒWhen she was in front with the
flag your stones was cold but it was a woman in front so you had to go,Ó he admits.

ÒWhen the police come, donÕt run,Ó 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. ÒPolice used to give we a hard time on the
road,Ó says her younger friend and colleague Jean-in-town, although eventually they left Bubulups
alone. ÒOnce 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: ÔAm I selling chataigne, peewah or pommecythere?Õ The whole court start to laugh
and the magistrate dismiss the case.Ó

On another occasion Jean-in-town told the magistrate, ÒI 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.Ó Again the court laughed and the case was dismissed.

This harrassment made Jean-in-town move to the clubs along the ÒGaza StripÓ on Wrightson
Road, west of Port of Spain. Perhaps her decision was influenced by her involvement with the Renegades
captain, Stephen ÒGoldteethÓ 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. ÒShe hit him some coconut and spread
him out,Ó recalls Belloram. ÒShe drop him but you know Alfred Gilkes with he little boxing tactics canÕt
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. IÕm telling you. You couldnÕt carry her nowhere. I could
remember that as a little fella. It was during the war, yes, about 1945.Ó

ÒBubulups darling, why you beat the officer?Ó sang one calypsonian after the incident: ÒSix
months hard labour.Ó

Some time before sheÕd 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 ÒThe beat
of the steelbandÓ 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. ÒShe was one of the first flagwomen
and all of them was jamettes,Ó 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
wasnÕt 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.

ÒOne 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,Ó recalls Jean-in-town. ÒThis 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 ÔLook out!Õ and I throw my hand to cover my face.Ó
 Until her death many years after she had left the streets, Bubulups remained close to Mayfield,
as to all her friends of Òher daysÓ, 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 BubulupsÕs 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, ÒI
never really like sex and thing, you know. I used to more rob man.Ó

Bubulups was never in that. And despite her battles with the police, she'd not let one be unfairly
beaten.

ÒShe saved my life years ago,Ó recalls former Police Commissioner Randolph Burroughs. That
was when he was a constable on the beat. ÒShe 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.Ó

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.
ÒBubulups knew the danger and she and Ruby Rab began pounding on the door, bawling ÔMurder!
They killing the man! Ring the police!ÕÓ Burroughs recounts. ÒPolice didn't have revolvers but I put my
hand in my pocket and pretend I have a gun until reinforcements from Besson Street arrived.Ó

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 sheÕd left the streets for good, she'd exaggerate to her
Clifton Street neighbour, Velma Denbow, that sheÕd always earned a fair amount of money, always had
nice clothesÑas if to justify the life sheÕd 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 backÑa 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 ChalkdustÕs 1992 ÒTrinidad ent changeÓ 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 itÕs unlikely. By then sheÕd already forsaken the streets and
Carnival for good. More likely she felt stung on hearing in 1946 Kitch's gloating ÒDing Dong DellÓ with its
unspoken rhyme, Òpussy in the wellÓ:

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. ÒFrom the first night we liked one another,Ó he says. ÒI told her I don't
want her to make no fares again, I going to mind her.Ó

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 TipooÕs 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
hadnÕt the money.

Eventually Yvonne ÒBubulupsÓ Smith was laid to rest on January 6, 1994, about two in the
afternoon, after a funeral service sponsored by Clark and BattooÕs 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.

kim johnson