Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [64]
After the war, the followers of John Frum constructed airstrips of their own, clearing the bush in an effort to lure John Frum back to Tanna with his promised riches. They built wooden replicas of the guns they had seen and marched in formation through their village clearings. They danced through the night every Friday and drank prodigious amounts of kava. When John Frum still didn’t return with his promised cargo, the believers shrugged and danced some more. Christians, they sagely observed, have been waiting two thousand years for Christ to return.
Today, in the village of Sulphur Bay, in the shadow of Mount Yasur, two flagpoles erected by followers of John Frum continue to fly the baby-blue flag of the U.S. Navy and the Stars and Stripes. This, Sylvia and I agreed, was one of the stranger sights we had encountered in the South Pacific. Almost as an afterthought, another pole carried the national flag of Vanuatu, hoisted grudgingly to appease the government, which periodically clashed with the John Frum Movement over its refusal to pay taxes to the state.
The village was constructed with almost geometric precision, like a barracks, with traditional homes arranged around a grassy ceremonial square. Ponderous waves broke heavily on the beach. Above loomed Mount Yasur, belching ash. It seemed a desolate place. We arrived with William in the afternoon, following our Yasur climb, and we waited as the villagers sat in the shade offered by two great trees. A heated argument of some sort was under way, with one elderly man in a sarong pointing a knobby cane at another elder, seated on an enormous tree root.
Eventually, the elder with the cane made his way toward us. “This is Chief Fred,” said William. Chief Fred greeted us warmly. “You are from America?” he asked through William, who acted as a translator.
Yes, we said, we are.
“I have been to America,” he said enthusiastically. “I have been to San Francisco, Denver, Houston, New York, and Washington, D.C. I am the Big Man in Sulphur Bay, and I went to meet your Big Men in America.”
“And did you meet our Big Men?” I asked.
“Yes. We talked about important things. They asked about Sulphur Bay.”
“And what did you tell them.”
“That Sulphur Bay is an ally of America.”
“Well, I’m sure they were very pleased to hear it.”
Sylvia asked, “Did you find traveling to America expensive?”
“Yes,” Chief Fred admitted. “It was very expensive. The people worked very hard to send their Big Man to America.”
He beckoned us toward the John Frum church, which looked like the other homes but had in its center a red wooden cross.
“I will tell you something,” Chief Fred said. “Jesus was from Tanna.”
“Ah…,” we said. Who knew?
“He was crucified on this cross,” he said.
“This one?” I said. Well, I thought, pondering the cross, Jesus must have been a dwarf. The cross was about four feet high and had the symmetry of the cross used by army medics to distinguish themselves from regular soldiers.
“Bethlehem,” continued Chief Fred, “was there on the hill, above the village. The River Jordan was Lake Isiwi.”
This was all news to us—not simply the fact that we were apparently in the Holy Land but that the followers of John Frum had anything to do with Christianity.
“But,” said Chief Fred, “we lost this knowledge. It was only when the missionaries came with the Bible that we learned our history.”
“But how did the missionaries learn about Jesus of Tanna?” I asked.
“Jesus flew from Tanna to the land of white man on top of a rainbow.”
This was not a point we could argue. And the fact that Jesus was from Tanna…well, there are many Americans who believe that God is an American. What was odd about this, however, was that it seemed to refute all that we had heard and read about the John Frum Movement.
“What about John Frum?” Sylvia asked.
“He