Merle Hodge’s rare achievement is to create a dynamic work of fiction around the life of a woman who is unquestionably Gwynneth Cuffie, schoolteacher, lover of children and music, and pillar of her small semi-rural community. The novel shares her adult life through the long, hard years of colonialism on the Caribbean island of Cayeri in the first half of the 20th century. Within Gwynneth’s family are all the faultlines of the Cayerian world. She, with sister Viola and younger brother, Roy, are the children of ill-sorted parents, a marriage wrought from a surge of youthful sexual attraction, but thereafter of two Black lives headed in different directions. Her Catholic schoolmaster father is desperate for respectability at the cost of denying everything about himself and his past in the impoverished world of the yards; her mother, a seamstress, is a stalwart of the Spiritual Baptist church, then banned by the authorities as a threat to colonial order. She is the one person that headmaster Cuffie dare not try to control. But when Gwynneth becomes deeply and tragically involved in the anti-colonial struggle, there grows an insuperable breach between father and daughter.
