Minty Alley Read online

  C. L. R. James

  * * *

  MINTY ALLEY

  With a new introduction by

  Bernardine Evaristo

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  About the Author

  C. L. R. James was born in Trinidad in 1901 and was one of the prominent figures in the West Indian diaspora. He was a writer, socialist and pioneering voice in literature. He wrote extensively on Caribbean history, Marxist theory, literary criticism, Western civilization, African politics, cricket and popular culture. His works include World Revolution, The Black Jacobins, Beyond a Boundary and his only novel, Minty Alley. He died in 1989.

  To my mother

  Introduction

  Black Britain: Writing Back is a new series I’ve curated with my publisher, Hamish Hamilton, at Penguin Random House. Our ambition is to correct historic bias in British publishing and bring a wealth of lost writing back into circulation. While many of us continue to lobby for the publishing industry to become more inclusive and representative of our society, this project looks back to the past in order to resurrect texts that will help reconfigure black British literary history.

  The books included in the series are my personal choices, determined by my literary values and how I perceive the cultural context and significance of the books. The series is not to be regarded as an attempt to be definitive or to create a canon. Canons are by their very nature hierarchical and have traditionally been constructed by the prevailing white orthodoxies of academia. Black British writers rarely appear on these reading lists, are rarely taught to new generations of readers and unless they become commercial successes, their legacy very quickly disappears.

  My aim is to present a body of work illustrating a variety of preoccupations and genres that offer important and diverse black British perspectives. Good books withstand the test of time, even if they are of their time. I am very excited to introduce these books to new readers who will discover their riches.

  In 1986 I went to see a production of The Black Jacobins (1967), a play about Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution by C. L. R. James, at the Riverside Studios in London. He was, at this stage, considered the elder statesman of black intellectuals and writers. Sadly, I never met him, but I knew that this impressive man was now frail, elderly and living in a flat above the offices of the radical Race Today collective at 165 Railton Road in Brixton. Its members included his nephew Darcus Howe, a familiar cultural figure on British television in the 1980s, and the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.

  A previous incarnation of the play, entitled Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History, had been staged at the Westminster Theatre in 1936, starring the famous African American film star, theatre actor, baritone and left-wing political activist Paul Robeson.

  Born in Trinidad in 1901, Cyril Lionel Robert James attended Queen’s Royal College, the country’s top school, where he became a keen cricketer and athlete. With aspirations to become a novelist, he had already published three short stories, La Divina Pastora (British Saturday Review, 1927), as well as Triumph and Turner’s Prosperity (both in Trinidad magazine, 1929), when he migrated to Britain in 1932, settling in Lancashire with his friend the great Trinidadian cricketer Learie Constantine, who was his mentor and sponsor. He eventually took up the post of cricket correspondent for the Guardian (a national newspaper based in Manchester then called the Manchester Guardian), which was an incredible achievement for a black man in Britain at that time. James became very involved in the Marxist left, anti-imperialism and especially Pan-Africanism, emerging as a powerful advocate for West Indian independence. He also helped found the International African Friends of Ethiopia when that country was attacked by the Italian dictator Mussolini. He moved in English literary circles and met the aristocratic writer and literary doyenne Edith Sitwell, in Bloomsbury, with whom he debated poetic form. His influential pamphlet, The Life of Captain Ciprani, was excerpted and published as The Case for West Indian Self-Government (1933) by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. He was a Trotskyist for many years, visiting Trotsky at his home in Mexico where they discussed ‘the Negro question’, and where he also met Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

  James lived in the States from 1938 to 1953, finally rejecting Trotskyism in 1951. He was imprisoned on Ellis Island in 1953 for overstaying his visa, afterwards leaving the country before he was expelled. He voluntarily moved back to Britain in 1953 and returned to Trinidad for the new West Indian Federation celebrations in 1958, where he edited the People’s National Movement pro-Independence newspaper, the Nation. In Britain, he lived in Hampstead and Willesden, and eventually in Brixton, where he died in 1989. A blue plaque was erected outside the Brixton house in 2004.

  One of James’s most celebrated books was The Black Jacobins (1938), the history of the Haitian Revolution which abolished slavery, and the inspiration for the two plays. He’d wanted to write a social history that showed black empowerment and Africans with agency in their own lives and futures, as opposed to being victims of oppression. His other highly celebrated work was Beyond a Boundary (1963), a book about cricket but which mixed memoir, sports commentary and social history with a focus on class. In 2005, it was ranked by the Observer as the third best book on sport ever written. He also published a book about Kwame Nkrumah, the first post-independence leader of Ghana, whom he had known as a student. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977) was published by Allison & Busby, co-founded by Margaret Busby, Britain’s first black publisher.

  James only ever wrote one novel, Minty Alley (1936), although as the first novel by a black Caribbean writer to be published in England it was an historic achievement. One can imagine how hard it was for him to publish a book about black Caribbean people all those years ago. He wasn’t part of the wave of Windrush-era writers such as Wilson Harris, George Lamming, Edgar Mittelholzer, V. S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey and Samuel Selvon, who benefited from being part of the larger movement of Caribbean migration to Britain. James had been a lone pilot in the 1930s.

  Minty Alley, a social-realist novel, never made its mark when it was first published and while it was republished by New Beacon Books in 1971, it is still not widely discussed or acknowledged, even though it definitely deserves to be. The only black British book to have received a degree of sustained interest from the twentieth century to today is Samuel Selvon’s immigrant caper The Lonely Londoners (1956), about black Caribbean men newly arrived in London. Selvon and his generation are indebted to James for breaking new ground with the way in which he validated ordinary, working-class Caribbean experiences and his groundbreaking use of the vernacular.

  Minty Alley was wr
itten in 1928 and set in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad. It centres on Haynes, a twenty-year-old middle-class black man who can no longer afford to stay in the house his deceased mother purchased and has had to downsize to a rented room in lodgings at No. 2 Minty Alley, a rundown ‘barrack-yard’. There, he gets to know the people living in the property and we experience them through him. Haynes is a reclusive, friendless, essentially spineless figure who has led an uneventful life. First his mother looked after him and planned his future; then the family servant, Ella. However, through staying at No. 2, his hitherto empty life soon fills up with the whirlwind of dramas, conflicts, subterfuge, entanglements, rages and desires that storm around him while he remains the still centre of the house – quiet and observant, a listener rather than a speaker; in fact, so unassuming that the other characters are magnified and intensified in comparison. Light-hearted, comic, occasionally sobering, always engrossing, the novel is a lovely and captivating read. It feels like eavesdropping on history, a sensation at once intimate and distant. Class features strongly, with the protagonist, in effect, slumming it with the lower classes but being deeply enriched and enlivened by the experience. The author pays attention to skin tone, describing the colouring and race of the characters, and through this he creates a microcosm of the pigmentocratic Caribbean long before racism and colourism began to be widely deconstructed and contextualized for debate. It’s a colonial novel rather than a post-colonial one, written thirty-three years before Trinidad gained its independence in 1962, but the British imperial power structures that governed this country are not the focus of the novel. This is a story about a Caribbean community in relationship with itself; about life on an island before the mass movement of people to either the United States or the United Kingdom. They are not foreigners in a hostile environment struggling to be accepted, although many of them have the ambition to migrate, but right now they are among their own and leading ordinary lives within a complicated web of entertaining relationships. I would argue that it laid the foundations for Naipaul’s most celebrated novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961). For the contemporary reader, we are allowed a peek into a society of nearly one hundred years ago, which shows us that while the circumstances are different, our essential passions, preoccupations and ambitions remain the same.

  Chapter One

  Haynes concluded his calculations and decided that he could not continue to live in the whole house. He would occupy two rooms and let the rest as soon as he could; but leave the house, that he would not do.

  He would tell Ella. As soon as he called, she came. He never had to call Ella twice. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she seemed to have one ear open in case Haynes called. Her fat black face shone with perspiration and good nature.

  ‘Sit down, Ella. I want to have a long talk with you.’

  ‘That’s all right, sir. What is it, sir?’

  ‘Sit down, Ella.’

  ‘It’s all right, sir. The dinner is cookin’, sir, and I have to go at once.’

  The influence of his dead mother still dominated the house. She was a perfect mistress, but never would she have asked Ella to sit down. And Ella remained standing.

  ‘I have worked it all out carefully, Ella, and shall live in half the house and let the other half. I shall take my mother’s bedroom and the study. I shall have a door cut to connect them. I don’t want to move. And with the rent from the house and the rooms in George Street and with my salary, I can just manage. That settles it.’

  ‘You think you will manage, sir?’

  ‘We’ll have to manage.’

  She made no reply, but she turned her head sideways and looked at him questioningly. He knew what that meant.

  ‘Look here, Ella. We can get eight dollars a month for the rest of the house.’

  ‘I doubt it, sir. If you let the whole house you can get sixteen dollars or even sixteen-fifty. But if you let half, even if you get seven it means you payin’ nine-fifty for these two rooms, sir. And then you have to pay a servant. It’s a lot of expense, sir.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You see, sir. I have been thinking it over, sir, and as I told you the other day, the best thing for you is to go and board and lodge with a family.’

  ‘And do what with you?’

  ‘I will go and get other work, sir.’

  ‘No, no, no. You are going to stay with me.’ He looked at her apprehensively. ‘You don’t want to leave me, Ella?’

  ‘No sir. I don’t want to leave you.’

  ‘Well, what were you saying?’

  ‘If you don’t want to board and lodge and you want me to go on seeing after things, sir, get a room, sir, a large room. It will cost you about four or five dollars. All I will want is a place to cook. You can take in your own things from here, sir. We can sell the piano and the furniture and use the money to repair the kitchen and the fence and help to pay some of the mortgage. I was talking to the man from Price & Co., sir. They will auction the things, sir, and take on the repairs and give you the balance. You can leave that to me, sir. They wouldn’t cheat me, sir.’

  ‘God, I wish I were rid of all this bother.’ He put his elbows on the table and rested his face on his hands.

  ‘Don’t let it trouble you, sir. You need a change, sir. You should move from this place.’

  ‘But where shall I go? The month will end in four days. If I don’t move it means another long month here.’

  ‘I thought that perhaps you would want to move and I’ve been looking, sir. There is a room vacant in a house in Charles Street, Mr. Newstead, the solicitor and his wife.’

  ‘I know them. They come to the shop. I don’t want to go and live near those people, Ella.’

  ‘There is another one, sir. It’s not nice, sir. I pass up and down there every day, and I saw the notice. It’s in Minty Alley, the second street from here. They are ordinary people, sir. Not your class of people.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘A Mrs. Rouse, sir. She makes cakes for sale, and she lives with a man who helps her. She has a very large kitchen where I could cook. But I don’t think you’ll like the place, sir.’

  ‘How much is it?’

  ‘Very cheap, sir. Two dollars and fifty cents.’

  ‘Well, let’s take it then, Ella.’

  ‘You had better go and see it first, sir.’

  ‘If I am to move I had better move quickly.’

  ‘Go and see it, sir.’

  ‘I’ll go and see it.’

  ‘All right, sir. And meanwhile, I’ll look for another place. Tell me when you want your dinner, sir.’

  Haynes tore up his calculations and threw them in the wastepaper-basket. The short tropical twilight had departed and it was already dark.

  Ella came back in.

  ‘You want the light on, sir?’

  ‘No, thank you, Ella.’

  ‘You want your dinner, sir?’

  ‘No, Ella, not yet. I am not hungry.’

  She did not go.

  ‘Perhaps you want to stay here, sir?’

  ‘No, Ella, no. It isn’t that. You go on. I’ll call you in a few minutes.’

  Yes, Ella was right. He wanted a change. It was better that he should move. Most of his childhood and his youth had been passed here, untroubled about anything except his own adolescent dreams. He had spent seven years at the secondary school, a shy, solitary boy, doing his lessons, playing games but making few friends, no friends – no, not one. (There was Boyce, but Boyce was not a friend.) He had grown up under the shelter of his mother, to whom he was everything and who was everything to him. Ever since he had known himself, he had known and accepted her plans for his future.

  ‘You are black, my boy. I want you to be independent, and in these little islands for a black man to be independent means that he must have money or a profession. I know how your father suffered, and you are so much like him that I tremble for you.’

  In the West Indies, to get a profession meant going to England
or America, and his mother had decided she would send him to England. She was a headmistress and in her spare time taught unwearyingly. First she had bought the house on a stiff mortgage. Haynes was to work in the island for a year or two and then, when the mortgage had been paid off, she would send him abroad and keep him there. Medicine it was to be. ‘Law wouldn’t suit you, my child. You are your father’s son.’ She got a job for him in the only book shop in the town, and Haynes worked in the day and came home and read the books in the evenings. For all the change it made, he might have been still at school. And then, suddenly, his mother had fallen ill, and after months of wearisome illness which had cost hundreds of dollars, she had died. Ella, the servant, who had been with them about a year before she fell ill, took charge of the house, and had continued as housekeeper for the helpless Haynes. Relations he had none that mattered. He shrank from his mother’s middle-aged friends. From sheer inertia he had continued living in the house. But he knew, long before Ella hinted it to him, that a change had to be made.

  Yes, he would leave and go and live somewhere else, save some money and do something. It was time. He was twenty. Twenty – and his life still a blank page.

  It would be best to take the cheap room. If he lost his job, what would he do? He wasn’t trained for anything. The book business, such as it was in that small island, he knew inside out. But if he should displease old Carritt all his knowledge would go for nothing and he would have to begin again elsewhere. The mortgage swallowed up a good portion of his small salary. There would be rent from the house, and there was the rent from two or three rooms in the slum quarter. But there were rates and constant repairs and the rent was irregular. Ella was right. It would be better to live cheaply, for a time at least. As long as Ella was there he would not suffer any inconvenience. And at the back of his mind unformulated, but nevertheless a steadily growing influence, was the desire to make a break with all his monotonous past life, school, home and the drowsy book shop. His mother was no more than a memory, a tender memory, but nevertheless only a memory. His life was empty. He did not think these things out clearly, but he knew them as people are aware of things without putting them into words. The sea of life was beating at the walls which enclosed him. Nervously and full of self-distrust, he had been fighting against taking the plunge, but he would have to sometime. Better now. He looked round at the pleasant furniture, the mahogany sideboard with its spotless china and the silver pieces. He could barely see them, but he had lived with them so long that they were stamped on his mind. The silver he would keep, but the rest would go. Ella was right. He must move. He had promised his mother to keep the house and he would keep it at whatever cost. He would marry some day and bring his bride home. But till that time, anywhere except staying there.