‘Platonic,’ said young Lucy, ‘how good.’ Her accent was Notting Hill Gate, flat-earth English, sharp, sceptical, it stung a little, but Jackson felt oddly stimulated. Her mother ignored her except that her demeanour changed again within chameleon bite of blood. ‘I frighten one day of dropping down on the road, sir. All them prying eye, prying hand, undressing, dressing me.’
‘What does it matter?’ Jackson said. ‘You won’t know a thing.’ He turned to hard-edged, slightly enigmatic daughter for support but she looked away swiftly to stare into space. Why had she bothered to come, he wondered. What could he say to please her?
‘It matter,’ said the older woman. ‘I would know, my hair would breathe, when strange hand touch me. Nowadays nobody care. People shooting each other in Jamaica. Call an election and bullet fly. Killing, wanting to kill, wanting to be killed, wanting to fight in the street, is immodest…’ She stopped.
Immodest! The word struck him. He had never thought of it like that. What did she mean? He stared into the woman’s eyes and caught the drift of half-sealed, half-unsealed consciousness as her fictional death, fictional disrobing, overshadowed the room. She was obsessed, he saw, by the thought that a dead person could come immodestly alive in the ‘boudoir of the coffin, the boudoir of polities’.
What an outrageous notion! Yet it glanced through his mind as a true conception of dressed urban angst and peasant black humour. It drew him down into the grave of the streets, the self-advertised killed around the globe upon Marsden’s towering stick converted now into Lucy Brown’s height of fear, her heightened fear of violence, the theatrical deaths that one saw on television, the tall dead celebrated by fanatics, the extensions of immodest naked action, immodest prosecution of feud, unconscious strip-tease, immodest wish-fulfilment, hunger-fasts, hate-fasts.
Young Lucy now got up from her chair and made her way over to the vase of flowers. Her mother’s eyes and Jackson’s eyes followed her across the room. ‘I wish she would marry a good man, not a freedom fighter, God knows what unfreedom he fighting for like in a nightmare; a good man with a bit of money in the bank, Mr Jackson. Can’t you talk to she?’
It was the kind of half-rude, half-rhetorical question for which the West Indian peasant was famous. By ‘talk’ Lucy Brown meant the magical power to bind to one’s will, to make someone do one’s bidding. That ‘talk’ was equated with ‘good or bad persuasion’ arose from an unconscious conviction that words were a sacred or daemonic medium since their roots were mysteriously cast in the rhythm of things, the implicit voice in every object one uses, implicit trance, utterance of binding contour in every feared object, respected object. Yet fear, Jackson wanted to say but could not, could also breed silence – the fear that’s close to ambiguous love – the fear of nemesis that helps to unravel temptation to seduce others or to be seduced by others.
‘Three year pass,’ Lucy Brown said, ‘since the motorcycle accident in 1978. Three anniversary. First anniversary ’79 Sebastian Holiday lose his job.’
Jackson did not know that Sebastian Holiday was hollow relation to his lost ‘daughter of Man’ and assumed the tea-lady was referring to someone at her workplace.
‘Second anniversary ’80 the recession bite deep and a lot of redundancy follow. Third anniversary ’81 Lucy Brixton boyfriend in trouble. Can’t you talk to her, Mr Jackson?’
‘A day’s just a day for me,’ said young Lucy coldly. ‘No talk will change that.’ She turned around a little from the vase of flowers. ‘And anyway you do enough talking for everybody and your anniversary’s early this year, isn’t it, mother? This is April not June.’
‘What motorcycle accident?’ said Jackson, turning away for a moment from young Lucy’s hard-edged, disturbing beauty of limb and breast.
‘It was a white boyfriend Lucy had. He die on the road in ’78.’
The young woman moved away slowly from the flowers, crossed the room and fondled the cat. Jackson’s eyes were unobtrusively glued to her. It was suddenly clear to him that there was an element of dream in the way she walked however sceptical or cold she seemed. On the surface her body was a wall between herself and eclipsed antecedents. Through Mary’s automatic codes however that clothed the room and propelled her pencil across the page of a mirror, Jackson perceived depths of characterization, hypnotic expedition.
His eyes seemed to open. Something came back to him like a blow of silence. A file of black women walking through the hills of Jamaica. He was a boy at the time in a car on his way with his father across the island. The women were dressed in white. They carried covered trays of food and other materials on their head. There was a statuesque deliberation to each movement they made, a hard-edged beauty akin to young Lucy’s that seemed to bind their limbs into the soil even as it lifted them very subtly an inch or two into space.
That lift was so nebulous, so uncertain, it may not have occurred at all. Yet it was there; it gave a gentle wave or groundswell to the static root or the vertical dance of each processional body. It also imbued the women with enigmatic privacy. Were they on their way to a wedding or a wake? To ask them was to be greeted with a smile one could not interpret. Was it the smile of secret mourning or secret rejoicing? Were they oblivious of secret, ecstatic ladder of space? Did they incline without knowing it into psychology of stasis, the stasis of the hills?
Jackson heard Lucy Brown’s voice again – her obsession with sudden death in the street, her obsession with her own funeral side by side with intimate (almost naked) desire for her daughter to marry ‘a good man with a bit of money in the bank’. No wonder her fear of immodest exposure possessed an involuntary compulsion or subconscious strip-tease funeral expectation (the eyes that would see her, the hands that would touch her) woven into a vision of her daughter’s wedding …
Such unconscious or subconscious strip-tease was an aspect of enigmatic privacy laid bare in half-comedy, half-tragedy, of Angel Inn mirror. It was an aspect of strangest carnival strip-tease of oblivious mankind, obliviousness of fashionable bullet-ridden nudity in the eye of the camera, obliviousness of Stella’s nudity in the street, obliviousness of Sukey Tawdrey’s rag dances of refined, imperial bombast, obliviousness of Mother Diver’s shawl of possessions.
All this moved like a stroke of mingled lust and sorrow in young Lucy’s dream-body, hard-edged, disturbing beauty, in the mirror of spectres by which Jackson was held in Mary’s ‘fictional book’. A series of reflections filled his mind from nowhere it seemed. She was a stubborn young woman, no one would deny. But there was more to it than that. The file of the folk by which Mary’s mirror had invested her emphasized that her feet were upon the ground but also made darkly clear the precarious linkage of secret ladder of space and static hill of earth. The link was actually broken, the static had begun to engulf them, that file of women, even in those far-off days of his boyhood.
He was witnessing – without realizing it – in that procession he saw in the hills, the regression of the dying folk into mysterious tune of love and death: mysterious attunement to a gulf or divide between sky and earth, between territorial, animal imperative and humankind or human space within all innocent/guilty, sad/happy places where Mack the Knife had moved or settled upon and around the globe …
Jackson recalled with sorrow how he himself had fallen from the ladder of space and into that fall was threaded his ‘lost’ daughter of man. Or was it that a descent of ‘daughter’ was needed to match an imperfectly understood notion or ‘ascent’ of son – daughter of man, son of man? The question loomed in Mary’s automatic book.
The question brought the hills into his room as he faced the two women and listened to Lucy Brown’s appeal to ‘talk’ to her daughter. The silent hills were running down to the sea not up to the sky. The rivers ran down the island of his boyhood to a sea that possessed so little tidal range there was no reversal of flow back upland or inland. Until the silent hills grew again to match the faint ascent of the spidery rain into the great cloud ancestors of Anancy heaven.
‘Ah,’ said Jackson turning away from the Jamaican hills to the young woman of Notting Hill, ‘to fulfil your mother’s trust …’ he was speaking to himself ‘… I must learn to be silent in the face of your obliviousness, I must learn to paint or sculpt what lies stranded between earth and heaven …’ He stopped. He looked at her with longing and clouded eyes. Lucy was so young. The minute hand of the clock moved in him to embrace her as Stella had embraced Mary by the hospital gates; as Khublall had embraced his child-bride a long time ago in the riddle of death and love.
Nineteen Lucy was but she seemed younger. He wanted to touch her like a painter or a sculptor and in so doing to create through the mystery of temptation.
What was that temptation? Enchantment with the womb of nature, an enchantment that remained the greatest danger still in bedevilled populations around the globe.
It had led to the arousal of the furies. It had damned him across a generation, no, longer than that, it seemed, a century, two centuries, three. It had given him, only to pluck from him, his ‘daughter of man’.
And now as he looked at Lucy the temptation was in flower again but with a difference. In the greatest flowering danger lies the greatest prize of artistic wisdom. Lucy was smiling at him as if she knew, yet did not know what he was saying to her, a Mona Lisa smile.
Does every lost daughter of man change into unconscious child-bride within cultures that are stranded between animal divinity and human divinity?
Samuel Selvon
[1923–94]
Samuel Selvon was born in San Fernando, Trinidad. His family was too poor to finance his education and he received no formal instruction beyond high school. His mother, who was fluent in Hindi, encouraged her son to learn the language and Selvon developed a culturally cosmopolitan identity, one that reflects his colonial upbringing in a racially mixed environment. In 1940 he joined the local branch of the Royal Navy Reserve, working as a wireless operator on minesweepers and torpedo boats until 1945, and it was during this period of relative economic stability that he began to experiment with stories and poetry. Inspired by the English writer Richard Jeffreys’s passionate prose about his native England, Selvon decided to express his love for the Trinidadian landscape and culture through writing.
From 1946 to 1950 Selvon worked as a journalist in Trinidad. As subeditor of the Guardian Weekly, the magazine for the Trinidad Guardian, he made important contacts that would be helpful throughout his career. He continued to write stories and poems, publishing several in the literary journal Bim and selling others to the BBC. In 1947 he married Draupadi Persaud and they started a family. But in 1950 she returned to her native Guyana and Selvon, by now feeling restless and restrained by life on a small island, left for London.
Upon his arrival, Selvon realized that making a fresh start would not be easy. Initially, he stayed at the Balmoral Hostel, a place occupied by Africans, Indians and many other West Indians. He was unable to get a job as a journalist because he was not a member of the National Union of Journalists. With much effort, he managed to secure a position as a civil servant at the Indian Embassy in London, and it was during his employment there that he wrote and published his first novel, A Brighter Sun (1952). The novel, which tells of a Trinidadian’s search for identity in a colonial society, is still heralded today as one of the most influential works in West Indian literature. However, Selvon’s writing ambitions, bolstered by book sales and positive reviews, were put on hold for fifteen months when he fell ill with tuberculosis and had to be hospitalized.
In 1954 Selvon left hospital and shortly after that he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for one year. He resigned from the Embassy to pursue a career as a full-time writer. It was during this period immediately following his illness that Selvon reached the height of his productivity, writing numerous novels, articles, radio plays, television and film scripts, and short stories. In 1956 he wrote The Lonely Londoners, a highly acclaimed novel about immigrant life in London in which he deftly illustrates the ambivalence that many immigrants feel about living in Britain and examines what is an important and recurring theme in his work: the way in which colonies both protect individuals and hinder their personal development. Based on his experiences and observations at the Balmoral Hostel, The Lonely Londoners was written entirely in what Selvon calls ‘the Trinidadian form of the Caribbean language’. One of its characters, Moses Aloetta, appears in several of Selvon’s later books.
Although Selvon’s wife rejoined him in England after his hospitalizaton, they eventually divorced. He married Althea Nesta Daroux in 1963 and they had two children. In 1978 Selvon and his family moved to Calgary, Alberta. He spent his time there writing and serving as writer-in-residence at various colleges and universities. In 1994, while on a return visit to Trinidad, he died.
Selvon has a firm grasp of the Trinidadian vernacular and the manner in which he marries it to a Joycean stream of consciousness in the following extract from his novel The Lonely Londoners is a remarkable achievement. The frustrated sexual and material ambitions of the immigrants, and their attempts to understand the new ‘English’ morality that is all around them, inform both the extract and the novel as a whole.
From The Lonely Londoners
Oh what a time it is when summer come to the city and all them girls throw away heavy winter coat and wearing light summer frocks so you could see the legs and shapes that was hiding away from the cold blasts and you could coast a lime in the park and negotiate ten shillings or a pound with the sports as the case may be or else they have a particular bench near the Hyde Park Corner that they call the Play Around Section where you could go and sit with one of them what a time summer is because you bound to meet the boys coasting lime in the park and you could go walking through the gardens and see all them pretty pieces of skin taking suntan and how the old geezers like the sun they would sit on the benches and smile everywhere you turn the English people smiling isn’t it a lovely day as if the sun burn away all the tightness and strain that was in their faces for the winter and on a nice day every manjack and his brother going to the park with his girl and laying down on the green grass and making love in the winter you would never think that the grass would ever come green again but if you don’t keep your eyes open it look like one day the trees naked and the next day they have clothes on sometimes walking up to the Bayswater Road from Queensway you could look on a winter day and see how grim the trees looking and a sort of fog in the distance though right near to you you ain’t have no fog but that is only deceiving because if somebody down the other side look up by where you are it would look to them as if it have fog by where you are and this time so the sun in the sky like a forceripe orange and it giving no heat at all and the atmosphere like a sullen twilight hanging over the big city but it different too bad when is summer for then the sun shine for true and the sky blue and a warm wind blowing it look like when is winter a kind of grey nasty colour does come to the sky and it stay there and you forget what it like to see blue skies like back home where blue sky so common people don’t even look up in the air and you feeling miserable and cold but when summer come is fire in the town big times fete like stupidness and you have to keep the blood cool for after all them cold and wet months you like you roaring to go though to tell truth winter don’t make much difference to some of the boys they blazing left and right as usual all the year round to talk of all the episodes that Moses had with woman in London would take bags of ballad Moses move through all the nationalities in the world and then he start the circle again everybody know how after the war them rich English family sending to the continent to get domestic and over there all them girls think like the newspapers say about the Jamaicans that the streets of London paved with gold so they coming by the boatload and the boys making contact and having big times with the girls working during the day and coming round by the yard in the evening for a cuppa and to hit one or two but anyone of Moses encounter is big episode because coasting about the Water it ain’t have no man with a sharper eye than he not even Cap could ask him for anything and one summer evening he was walking when he spot a number and he smile and she smile back and after a little preliminary about the weather Moses take her for a drink in the pub and after that he coast a walk with she in Kensington Gardens and they sit down on the grass and talk about how lovely the city is in the summer and Moses say how about coming to my yard she went but afterwards Moses nearly dead with fright because the woman start to moan and gasp and wriggle and twist up she body like a piece of wire when Moses ask she what happen she only moaning Moses start to get cold sweat because he know that if anything happen to the woman and the police find her in his yard that he wouldn’t stand a chance the way how things against the boys from in front so he begin to rub the woman down and pat she and try to make she drink some water what happen to you Moses ask frighten like hell that the woman might conk off on his hands the woman only gasping and calling out for her mother and Moses sweating just then the bell ring and Moses went to the door and see Daniel Daniel he say boy a hell of a thing happening here man I just pick up a woman up the road and bring she in the yard and it look like if she dying what Daniel say as if he don’t understand wait here Moses say and he run back in the room listen he tell the woman my friend come and you have to go put on your clothes by the time Moses went and call Daniel inside the woman was calm and cool as if nothing happen she look all right to me Daniel say eyeing the piece as if he ready to charge but Moses was too frighten to keep the woman around though she sit down on the bed and begin to talk calmly boy he tell Daniel you wouldn’t believe me but the woman did look as if she going to dead you only lying because I happen to come round while you have she here Daniel say but Moses so relieve that she looking all right that he didn’t bother with Daniel he just tell her to come and go right away so he take her out to the Bayswater Road to catch a bus the heel of my shoe is coming off she say will you come with me to get it fixed sure Moses say but as soon as they hop on the bus and it begin to drive off Moses hop off again and leave she going to Marble Arch what a gambol does go on in the park on them summer nights oh sometimes the girls wishing it would get dark quickly and you have them parading all down the Bayswater Road from the Arch to the Gate and you could see them fellars going up and talking for a minute and if they agree they go in the park or somewhere else together and if not the fellar walk on but these fellars that cruising they could size up the situation in one glance as they pass by and know if they like this one or that one you does meet all sorts of fellars from all walks of life don’t ever be surprised at who you meet up cruising and reclining in the park it might be your boss or it might be some big professional fellar because it ain’t have no discrimination when it come to that in the park in the summer see them girls in little groups here and there talking and how they could curse you never hear curse until one of them sports curse you if you approach one and she don’t like your terms she tell you to – off right away and if you linger she tell you to double – off but business is brisk in the park in the summer one night one of them hustle from behind a tree pulling up her clothes and she bawl out Mary the police and if you see how them girls fade out and make races with the tight skirts holding the legs close together and the high heels going clopclop but that was no handicap when they take off it have some fellars who does go in the park only to cruise around and see what they could see you could always tell these tests they have on a coat with the collar turn up and they hand in they pocket and they breezing through the park hiding from tree to tree like if they playing hide and seek one night Moses was liming near the park and a car pull up that had a fellar and a old-looking woman in it the fellar start to talk friendly and invite Moses home for a cup of coffee and Moses went just to see what would happen and what happen was the fellar play as if he fall asleep and give Moses a free hand because it have fellars who does get big thrills that way but Moses didn’t do anything because he know what the position like and even though the fellar offer him three pounds he smile and was polite and tell him that he sorry good night introducing Galahad to the night life Moses explain to him about short time and long time and how to tackle the girls and he take Galahad one night and let him loose in the park Galahad say I going to try and he broach a group under the trees about a hundred yards from the corner by the Arch but from the time he begin to talk the girl tell him go – off Galahad stand up to argue but Moses pull him away those girls not catholic at all Galahad say Moses say it have some of them who don’t like the boys and is all the fault of Cap because Cap don’t like to pay let us cut through the park and go by Hyde Park Corner Galahad say when they reach there Moses pick up a sharp thing who was talking to two English fellars and he take her to the yard afterwards the girl tell him how she used to take heroin at one time and she show him the marks on her arm where she inject the kick Moses stay with the thing regularly for a week then he get tired and tell Cap he have a girl if he interested and Cap give the usual answer so Moses tell him to come in the yard in the night that the girl would be there Cap went and Moses left the two of them in the room and went for a walk when he come back three hours later Cap was in the bathroom and the thing was standing up before the gas fire warming up the treasury your friend have any money she ask Moses yes Moses say he have bags of money he is the son of a Nigerian king and when he goes back home he will rule more than a million people the girl ask Moses if he want anything take it easy Moses say when Cap come back Moses tell him to drop the girl up the road and the girl went with Cap thinking that he have plenty of money when Cap get to the corner he tell her to wait he going to change a five-pound note as he don’t go around with small change and he left the girl standing up there and never went back meantime Moses sit down on the bed and the bed fell down when Cap come back he say Cap you are a hell of a man you break my bed Cap say sorry Moses say this is the third time you break my bed Cap say it was warm and nice in the bed Moses say what I will tell the landlord this thing happening so often and he had was to put a box and prop up the bed to sleep summer does really be hearts like if you start to live again you coast a lime by the Serpentine and go for a row on the river or you go bathing by the Lido though the water never warm no matter how hot the sun is you would be feeling hot out of the water but the minute you jump in you start to shiver and have to get out quick but it does be as if around that time of the year something strange happen to everybody they all smiling and as if they living for the first time so you get to wondering if it ain’t have a certain part of the population what does lie low during the cold months and only take to the open when summer come for it have some faces in the Water that Moses never see until summer come or maybe they have enough money to go Montego Bay in winter and come back to the old Brit’n when they know the weather would be nice listen to this ballad what happen to Moses one summer night one splendid summer night with the sky brilliant with stars like in the tropics he was liming in Green Park when a English fellar come up to him and say you are just the man I am looking for who me Moses say yes the man say come with me Moses went wondering what the test want and the test take him to a blonde who was standing up under a tree and talk a little so Moses couldn’t hear but Blondie shake her head then he take Moses to another one who was sitting on a bench and she say yes so the test come back to Moses and want to pay Moses to go with the woman Moses was so surprise that he say yes quickly and he went with the thing and the test hover in the background afterwards he ask Moses if he would come again and Moses say yes it look like a good preposition to me I don’t mind and he carry on for a week the things that does happen in this London people wouldn’t believe when you tell them they would cork their ears when you talk and say that isn’t true but some ballad happen in the city that people would bawl if they hear right there in Hyde Park how them sports must bless the government for this happy hunting ground the things that happen there in the summer hard to believe one night two sports catch a fellar hiding behind some bushes with a flash camera in his hand they mash up the camera and beat the fellar where all these women coming from you never know but every year the ranks augmented with fresh blood from the country districts who come to see the big life in London and the bright lights also lately in view of the big set of West Indians that storming Brit’n it have a lot of dark women who in the racket too they have to make a living and you could see them here and there with the professionals walking on the Bayswater Road or liming in the park learning the tricks of the trade it have some white fellars who feel is a big thrill to hit a black number and the girls does make them pay big money but as far as spades hitting spades it ain’t have nothing like that for a spade wouldn’t hit a spade when it have so much other talent on parade don’t think that you wouldn’t meet real class in the park even in big society it have hustlers one night Moses meet a pansy by Marble Arch tube station and from the way the test look at him Moses know because you could always tell these tests unless you real green you have a lovely tie the pansy say yes Moses say you have a lovely hat yes Moses say you have a very nice coat yes Moses say everything I have is nice I like you the pansy say I like you too Moses say and all this time he want to dead with laugh I have a lovely model staying in my flat in Knightsbridge the pansy say she likes to go with men but I don’t like that sort of thing myself would you like to come to my flat sure Moses say we will go tomorrow night as I have an important engagement tonight I will meet you right here by the station the test say but so many people are here Moses say I might miss you if you don’t see me you can phone but what will we do when I come to your flat Moses say playing stupid and the test tell him what and what they wouldn’t do one night he and Galahad was walking up Inverness Terrace when a car pass going slow and the door open and a fellar fling one of the sports out the poor girl fall down and roll to the pavement all the other sports in the area rally and run up to she and pick she up and ask she what happen she say she went with the fellar but he didn’t want to pay and she give him two cuff in his face and he pitch she out the car another night a big Jamaican fellar take two home and had them running out of the house and he throw their clothes for them from the window people wouldn’t believe you when you tell them the things that happen in the city but the cruder you are the more the girls like you you can’t put on any English accent for them or play ladeda or tell them you studying medicine in Oxford or try to be polite and civilize they don’t want that sort of thing at all they want you to live up to the films and stories they hear about black people living primitive in the jungles of the world that is why you will see so many of them African fellars in the city with their hair high up on the head like they ain’t had a trim for years and with scar on their face and a ferocious expression going about with some real sharp chicks the cruder you are the more they like you the whole blasted set of them frustrated like if they don’t know what it is all about what happen to you people Moses ask a cat one night and she tell him how the black boys so nice and could give them plenty thrills people wouldn’t believe or else they would cork their ears and say they don’t want to know but the higher the society the higher the kicks they want one night Moses meet a nice woman driving in a car in Piccadilly and she pick him up and take him to a club in Knightsbridge where it had a party bags of women and fellars all about drinking champagne and whisky this girl who pick him up get high and start to dance the cancan with some other girls when they fling their legs up in the air they going around to the tables where the fellars sitting Moses sit down there wondering how this sort of thing happening in a place where only the high and the mighty is but with all of that they feel they can’t get big thrills unless they have a black man in the company and when Moses leave afterwards they push five pounds in his hand and pat him on the back and say that was a jolly good show it have a lot of people in London who cork their ears and wouldn’t listen but if they get the chance they do the same thing themselves everybody look like they frustrated in the big city the sex life gone wild you would meet women who beg you to go with them one night a Jamaican with a woman in Chelsea in a smart flat with all sorts of surrealistic painting on the walls and contemporary furniture in the G-plan the poor fellar bewildered and asking questions to improve himself because the set-up look like the World of Art but the number not interested in passing on any knowledge she only interested in one thing and in the heat of emotion she call the Jamaican a black bastard though she didn’t mean it as an insult but as a compliment under the circumstances but the Jamaican fellar get vex and he stop and say why the hell you call me a black bastard and he thump the woman and went away all these things happen in the blazing summer under the trees in the park on the grass with the daffodils and tulips in full bloom and a sky of blue oh it does really be beautiful then to hear the birds whistling and see the green leaves come back on the trees and in the night the world turn upside down and everybody hustling that is life that is London oh Lord Galahad say when the sweetness of summer get in him he say he would never leave the old Brit’n as long as he live and Moses sigh a long sigh like a man who live life and see nothing at all in it and who frighten as the years go by wondering what it is all about.
James Berry
[1924-]
