AUSTIN YEARWOOD TAKES HIS READERS by the hand through his childhood Down Danesbury Gap—that “non-descript track of unpaved road”—past the Three-Mile Stone and the board-and-shingle houses, between majestic manchineel and mahogany trees, over the sea’s debris of “old motor car tires, old tots, old rum bottles and even the occasional bloated dead body from deep within the churning chasm of its heaving intestines.” On the way, he introduces us to his neighbours by name and nickname like Rat Bakes and Bare Legs. We marvel at Duplex, whose pennywhistle play is “a source of joy and wonder to everyone...our very own Pied Piper,” and eavesdrop on the rum-shop banter and debate on cricket and politics and on the fishermen’s discussions about sex, infidelity and mistaken paternity, their tongues loosened by liquor. We fill our bellies with cheese cutters and jam puffs with sweet coconut water.
Our tour guide, the self-styled king of Danesbury, generously shares his intimate knowledge, his perceptive eye that misses nothing and his memory for detail. He also reveals his emotional attachment to his home: “I love my Black Rock village. It is the world to me. I love being a Black-Rockian. There is nothing better.” His narrative is, perhaps, less the Echoes of Memory he implies in his subtitle, and more a vivid, living portrayal of childhood and community by one who has experienced it all. As he says in his author’s note, this is a picture of a childhood of “innocence,” “magic” and “pure unfiltered and unadulterated joy.” We couldn’t wish for a better guide.
All childhoods are rooted in and shaped by their social context—by school, family, community, and, to some extent, the church, and Yearwood portrays this well. In this matrifocal context, family life for him, as for many Barbadian children, centres on his mother. She is both nurturing supporter and strict disciplinarian. Her daily wake-up harangue is accompanied by a splash of cold water, a stinging lash with the window stick and admonition to get on with his chores. This is how mothers were, maybe how they had to be. Yearwood’s relationship with his mother is complex and ambiguous. He laments, “I still do not understand my mother,” but looks back with respect, admiration and appreciation for her. She is the woman “on whose wings I shall continue to hitch my ride”—sentiments that may well resonate with many a Caribbean man.
Yet it is the softer figure of his grandmother to whom he is devoted. There is nothing as precious as Daydee, this “strong-willed, free-spirited woman”; nothing as mouth-watering as her white sugar-cakes, comforts, glassies, and black bitch; nothing as fascinating as her snuff taking; nothing as devastating as her death. His father also features: more as role model—as expert village barber with panache, first-class cricketer and footballer, bass singer and great danceroom—but as a man who, like many other fathers, mysteriously disappears, in this case partway through the book.
In this context, family bonds extend beyond the household to a network of bloodlines that, as Yearwood puts it, “cross and crisscross each other to the extent that we are always rubbing up against an uncle, aunt, or cousin in the least expected places. Occasionally we might even find that we have an ‘outside’ brother or sister in some not too distant corner of the neighbourhood and suddenly our family becomes that much larger.” Families hold together despite the perennial problems of disputed paternity, women who horn their men, ready-made jackets, outside children and strike-back children.
Yearwood evokes the closeness of community. Everyone knows everyone and pulls together, and outsiders are tolerated only if they follow the codes of good community living. This solidarity is evident at funerals—the “cadence of common sorrow” that spreads across the entire village—and on the occasions when chattel houses are relocated. Then, “all hands congregate,” and volunteers are rewarded with food and drink prepared by the host—"the only form of payment acceptable.”
And what a feast it is, especially as seen through the eyes of a young Yearwood:
“Such indigenous fare as rice and peas and flying fish is the norm. Occasionally generous helpings of cou-cou covered with copious amounts of salt fish or red herring are doled out. This is served with the sauce floating atop the mound of steaming corn meal like lava at the top of a small volcano from a crater shaped by the back of a large spoon. A few cans of Exeter Corned Beef, laced with the customarily lethal hot sauce, spiked of course by several ‘nigger peppers,’ and further complemented by a few loaves of salt-bread, round out the fare. These ‘salt-breads’ must have the obligatory strip of a palm leaf embedded in the side of the loaf in order to verify their authenticity. An entire tin of ‘crispy’ Eclipse biscuits might also help.
“For the teetotallers copious amounts of freshly made lemonade, mauby, or any variety of local soft drinks[,] such as Ju-cees [sic], Frutees, and Martineaus, are made available to ‘wash down’ whatever is consumed. Inevitably a flask bottle or ‘pint-’n-half’ of Mount Gay Rum always manages to emerge. This invariably leaves a few of the men feeling ‘tight’ or ‘sweet’, as the saying goes. Boisterous accusations of not being able to ‘hold your blasted liquors, as man!’ are common. Bound in a brotherhood of fatigue and intoxication colourful stories of time spent ‘up in Amur’ca, gor’-blummah, cutting big bamboo sticks o’ sugar cane,’ or picking fruits, ‘upin Roches-tuh!’ while suffering the discomfort of unaccustomed weather, then play counterpoint to the rhythmic sound of hammer and nail as the house comes back together.”
*
THE VILLAGE has its characters—its “mystic men,” according to Yearwood—eccentrics who defy convention yet belong. Among them is Boguh Lord, who, against the law, dynamites fish out of the sea.
“[As he] walks the beach, we watch with deep reverence and a sense of fearful anticipation. We follow every step of his calloused feet as they carve deep everlasting imprints into the age-old sands of Pile Bay....
“Boguh has a certain patented way of doing things. He walks slowly up and down the beach looking and listening. Occasionally he checks the sky. He does this to decipher the hieroglyphics there to which he and those of his ilk, versed in the art of celestial reading, are privy. He gauges the wind and gazes at how it plays on the surface of the sea. He then stands silently, as if in a trance, while he computes the information.
“Finally he choses a spot. He then wades out into the water until it encircles his waist.... We watch while he stands motionlessly like a statue. He looks just like a torso, a bottomless half of a man cast in black marble on the surface of the water. It makes us wonder if he is perhaps related to that other man, the man from Galilee, the carpenter, the one who walked on the surface of the sea....
“And then quite suddenly it happens. A quick, almost imperceptible blur of motion flashes before our eyes as the Lord makes his toss. The projection is precise and the projectile deadly. We press our palms tightly against our ears. The deafening explosion sends shock waves through our bodies. A giant geyser of sea water erupts from the place where the stick of dynamite has landed. It makes light work of the school of unsuspecting fish blowing hundreds of them sky high.”
School, for Yearwood, is St Stephen’s Elementary School, and, like all others at the time, it is almost military in its structured routine and authoritarian discipline. Pupils stand at stiff attention, undergo daily inspections for clean hands and teeth, combed hair, recite daffodil poems in proper English, endure heavy physical punishment, and write lines (I will not talk in class), three hundred times or more.
Across the three domains of school, home and community, a persistent ingredient of childhood is severe corporal punishment. Teachers “catch afire your tail with licks” and crash twelve-inch rulers against each knuckle; at home, there are severe whippings, and neighbours share lashes for the smallest of transgressions. The watchman with his bull-pistle is most feared. Nowhere is safe, and so vivid is Yearwood’s portrayal that we feel the blows and cower at the language of threats, almost as bad as the reality: “tar your backside naked with blows,” “lather your little backside in blows,” “catch-afire your little hard-ears backside with bare licks,” “wash out your mouth with soap.”
When threatened with blows, the boys “immediately panic. We start to cry, and beg. If this should fail we then resort to lying. We cry and beg and lie all at the same time. Big globs of snot run down our noses. We twist around in the hand of our captor like a duck worm and fall on the ground forcing her to drag us all the way home. This falling on the ground, however, is really involuntary. We are so frightened that our knees no longer work.”
Once home, they face the wrath of their mothers: “‘Boy, you know for your—WHAP! self, that you—WHAP—WHAP! doesn’t have no blessed right—WHAPWHAP—WHAP! getting on so and making my poor face shame in front all the people out the front road?! WHAP! I tries my level-best to teach you manners and look what you doing. Had not for Miss Wal—WHAP—cott I woulda never know that this—WHAP!—is—what—WHAP!—you—WHAP! Does—be getting on with when you leave my eyesight! Thank yuh soul. Yuh see how yuh does can’t swear for children?’ WHAP—WHAP—WHAP WHAP!
“It is murder pure and simple. ‘Wemms’ and welts instantly appear all over our bodies.”
As if this is not enough, children are ignored, humiliated and verbally abused as “ungrateful low-class hooligans” and “vagabonds.” Yet all this Yearwood presents as a fact of life, without rancour or resentment.
If there is resentment in Yearwood’s account, it is toward the rigid race-class hierarchy and extremes of social inequality that characterized the Barbados of his youth. The poverty he describes is highly visible in board-and-shingle homes, hunger and bare feet; ashes for toothpaste and blue soap for backyard baths; and chinks in your bed at night. There are minimal employment prospects and little chance of social mobility. Yearwood rails at the whites-only membership of the Carlton Club cricket ground, their vicious guard dogs, the way his mother is exploited as a hotel maid, and the unquestioning loyalty to the Queen and Union Jack.
But his tone is more sarcastic than angry. Seated before his fifth form exams, set in England—the local Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) still far from being established—he says, “These have been sent from Oxford and Cambridge, one of the Mother Country’s most hallowed institutions of learning. They have been sanctified and sealed with the same brutish British glue that has kept us stuck to the royal backside of the monarchy for far too many years to dutifully inhale its flatulence while being assured that it is nothing more than an aromatic breeze.... We are ready to go. It is time to show the good folk at the University of Oxford and Cambridge in England of what stellar Barbadian stock we, their British subjects are made.”
*
WHAT CONCERNS YEARWOOD is the local response to broken dreams and denied opportunities: not rebellion, rather an ideology of acceptance, stoicism and prayer. Evident in his account is the survival strategy of denying one’s own poverty by comparison with others worse off. “I have learnt that I am not poor, not really. Poverty is the hungry half-naked child...who will never get to go to school in a country ravaged by civil war.” With the generosity of spirit that characterizes his writing, Yearwood emphasizes how the richness of family and community compensates for material deprivations.
Poverty and powerlessness generate strict codes for living, and Yearwood articulates these well, feeding them into the book at intervals mainly through the voices of his characters. You must “know your place,” “be careful what you wish for,” “don’t pick up what you don’t put down,” “don’t trouble what don’t trouble you.” The socialization of children is packed with rules he knows only too well: “cleanliness is next to godliness,” “manners maketh man,” “be seen and not heard,” and the all important “respect your elders.”
“We move about the village with impunity.... This freedom we have been so lovingly granted has to be constantly earned. We are keenly aware that it can easily be yanked from our grasp should we ever be so foolish as to take it for granted. We know that certain infractions are unforgivable. We are charged therefore with a non-negotiable mode of behaviour and social conduct. For one thing we must never, ever, show any form of disrespect to our elders. This is tantamount to death or at the very least a severe whipping followed by a few hours kneeling with our faces in a corner of the house and our hands reaching for the heavens. We are also never allowed to ‘eat food’ at anybody’s house. This caveat is driven into our ears with the patented monologue that reverberates throughout the village like the warning of an approaching hurricane.
“‘Looka, don’t lemme hear that you does be walking ’bout the place eating food at people, hear? Next thing yuh know I would be hearing how I don’t feed you.’”
There is no mention in these regulations of the importance of carefree play in children’s lives. Yet boys will be boys—there are fun times, games and pleasures. The boy-child Yearwood roams freely with his friends. They all have nicknames, teasing reminders that all are equal. Men and boys are tagged as Small Cokes, Bird, Scoop, Poochie, and Styler Boy; women and girls are more kindly labelled as Angel, Dell, Love, and Puss. The boys pick out shapes in the clouds, catch fish, run to watch cane fires burning, shoot blackbirds with pieces of scrap metal fired from guttapercs, collect bubble gum pictures of Elvis and Doris Day, pitch cat-eye marbles, forage for dunks, and, of course, play cricket.
“It is a beautiful day. The sun is out, the field is dry and there is not one solitary cloud in our school-vacationing sky. It is perfect weather for our cricket game. We have two boys bowling to keep the action flowing. Each of us has adopted the name of a famous West Indian cricketer. This is serious stuff. It means that we have to perform with the kind of flair necessary to properly represent our chosen hero. We cannot for instance claim to be Sir Garfield Sobers, the greatest cricketer the world has ever seen, and then be clean bowled for a duck. It would be equally blasphemous to assume the bowling capabilities of the lightning-fast duo of Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith and have the most dangerous bouncer in our arsenal hooked all the way over the casuarina trees and out to St Stephen’s Hill for six….
“We would have to take permanent leave of the village!”
Food, that constant preoccupation of growing boys, commands a central place in Yearwood’s story. We feel his enjoyment at eating Eclipse and Wibix biscuits with powdered Klim milk at school. We see him and his friends drool over snowballs, and “coconut sweet breads, cut drops, rock cakes, jam puffs, turnovers, lead pipes,” and other delicacies washed down with penny glasses of lemonade and coconut water until they are fit to burst. At which point they write their names in “gushing letters of foaming pee.”
Later toward puberty, there is the attraction of girls—hand-holding, the first kiss and the opportunity for “rudeness” in the game Hiddy-Biddy shut up yuh lap tight-tight-tight.
But even in this safe haven of Danesbury and its environs, dangers are ever-present. They take many forms, from the “wild boys” of the Nightengale Children’s Home to big, fearsome rats; roving packs of ravenous, mange-infested stray dogs and “forty legs,” the centipedes that attack babies. (They “crawl through it mout’ and come out through it nose-hole.”) Supernatural beings abound. There are duppies and goblins galore, the blood-sucking hag and the dreaded steel-donkey, and, cruellest of all, the heartman, cutting out human hearts to sell to the devil. The sea, so much a part of the life of this coastal community, cannot be trusted. It is “a place of adventure, of frolic, and most of all, fear,” with no back door.
*
YEARWOOD PRESENTS a particularly poignant description of the consequences of a near drowning episode: “We gain the shore and throw ourselves on the sand around them. We are deathly afraid. Even though they have coughed up all the water from their heaving bodies we still cannot believe they are not really dead. We gaze at them and some of us even touch them. We match the tears in their eyes with ours. They are tears of fear, of relief, and of gratitude.
“Each year during our vacation we lose at least one of our school friends this way. In our exuberance to fully exploit this welcome freedom from the rigid lives we lead in the classroom some of us take too many chances. As a consequence on the first day of school after these breaks the name of some boy is sure to be read from the platform. We are then sorrowfully informed that a schoolmate has been devoured by the jaws of the sea. For long months afterwards our own parents will forbid us even to walk on the sand.”
Austin Yearwood’s story combines autobiography and social history, a personal coming of age with an in-depth study of community life. He tells it as it was, simple and direct, though with the occasional use of flowery language. The Three-Mile Stone, for example, has “the numeral ‘3’ etched unceremoniously in its physiognomy.” Much of this memoir reads as a personal romp through boyhood, albeit one under strong adult surveillance and constraint. But as he grows up through the chapters, so his experiences change and his perceptions mature, and we hear his views on inequity—how the accident of birth deprives people. But he avoids heavy-handed dogmatism and does this mostly though the lives of others such as Duplex, who would have been “celebrated for his genius” had he been born abroad. Yearwood’s tone is almost self-deprecating and self-questioning: “I wonder what it is that I’m really doing,” he asks as he leaves Barbados. His motive seems to be more to reflect and share, and to do so generously, than to analyze or rant; to deepen his own understanding by presenting experience as it was, rather than to lecture. He adopts a light touch and a consistent sense of humour—no regrets, no bitterness.
Though the trajectory is chronological, taking us from early childhood to youth, Yearwood combines this with a thematic format. His vignettes of places, experiences and characters are reflected in his chapter headings. This makes his narrative more enticing, more of a page-turner than the more conventional I was born, then, then.... The book is well edited, and there is very little, if any, repetition. But, the end, the last two chapters, entitled, respectively, “Reflections” and “Exodus,” are somewhat of a letdown. Endings are always difficult. The where to end in his story is clear: he leaves Barbados and his childhood. The how is, perhaps, less well handled and somewhat of a disappointment given the vigour of the narrative throughout.
Yearwood’s book is like an oral history that could equally well be heard out loud as read off the page, and would translate well into a stage play or film. The dialogue is authentic, clear and colourful. We can hear each of the voices, from the mother’s tough-love scolding to the banter between the boys as friends. What consistently shines through are his roots, the emotional attachment that so many leave behind and lose when they migrate to a “big” country.
“In the village I am loved and chastised, complemented and reprimanded as befits the occasion. Being ignored has never been my lot. It cannot possibly be done any better any place else. I am made to understand that I am a treasured son of all who surround me, born within spitting distance of the Three-Mile Stone, across from the Free Hill, on the Black Rock Main Road, with the smell of the beaches of Paradise, Pile Bay, and Batts Rock in my nostrils and the kiss of the ocean’s breeze on my face. I will take the village and its teachings with me wherever I go for I am first and foremost a Black-Rockian.”
Christine Barrow was born in the UK and lived for nearly fifty years in Barbados, where she worked as an academic in Caribbean Social Development at The University of the West Indies. After retirement, she began writing fiction and eventually returned to the UK (Brighton). Her short stories have been published in Bim: Arts for the 21st Century, The Caribbean Writer and Callaloo. Barrow is the author of the story collection Black Dogs and the Colour Yellow (Peepal Tree Press, 2018). She won top place (second prize) in the 2023 Frank Collymore Literary Endowment competition for her unpublished prose manuscript Rainbow Window.
