152 KIM ROBINSON WALCOTT

Wide Sargasso Sea as Christophine though the view of this latter figure as
negative is mostly from the eyes of the foreign English 'othered' husband
of Antoinette and less from Antoinette herself. Nevertheless, not only for
Antoinette's husband but also for Allfrey's and Drayton's characters,
obeah is evidence of black barbarity, as well as being the unknown quantity
- unpredictable, irrational, uncontrollable, terrifying. Inevitably, obeah is
viewed as an index of the sinister threat that blacks represent. Obeah is
mysterious, unfathomable, inexplicably powerful.
 Obeah is also present in H. G. de Lisser's historical novel The White Witch of
Rosehall 7 (1929), set in the same post-Emancipation Jamaica period as Wide
Sargasso Sea (though in de Lisser's work the portrayal seems tinged more
with cynicism than with terror). Here, though, there is an interesting twist: the
obeahwoman is white. However, Annie Palmer has learnt all her black magic
skills from a black Haitian voodoo priestess, skills which she has sharpened
with the help of local obeahman Takoo, and which she is using to control the
"massive and smouldering black population" of slaves on her estate.
 In The Orchid House and Christopher, Allfrey and Drayton give sympathetic
portrayals of unshaking devotion in their nanny figures of Lally and Gip
respectively, but the portrayals read as somewhat stereotypical in an Aunt-
Jemima way. Here one is reminded of the picture painstakingly painted by
Mrs. Carmichael, a century before, of the 'good negro', who is "industrious,
civil, with some sense of his own dignity, and a wish to retain a place in the
good opinion of his master and all around him ..." (Vol. II 131) as opposed to
the more commonly encountered (Vol. II 272) 'bad negro' who is dishonest,
deceitful, mischievous, wasteful, lazy and, most disturbing of all, treacherous
(Vol. II 302).8 Rhys's Christophine embodies both types: unshakingly loyal to
Annette and Antoinette, but is also an unfathomable, sinister, unpredictable
obeahwoman possibly based on Rhys's own memories of her own terrifying,
sadistic nurse, Meta (mentioned in Smile Please). The characterization is
stereotypical, even if in opposing ways, only to some extent, however: with
her penetrating understanding of Antoinette's mind and situation with all
their fragility and ambivalence, with her fierce pride and morality, impatience,
compassion, strength of conviction and willfulness, Christophine emerges
as the novel's most complex, and most powerful, figure.
 Indeed, a number of white West Indian writers over the last century have
experimented with black protagonists in ways which transcend the good negro/
bad negro stereotypes, albeit as one-off efforts. For example, Alice Spinner
(the pen name for Augusta Zelia Fraser, an Englishwoman resident in Jamaica),

7 H. G. de Lisser, The White Witch of Rosehall (1929; London/Basingstoke: Macmillan
Caribbean, 1982).
8 Mrs. Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured,
and Negro Population of the West Indies, 2 vols. (1833; New York: Negro Universities
Press, Greenwood Publishing Corp., 1969).