TAKING, OR SPURNING, THE IMPERIAL RoAD 153

focuses (with a combination of curiosity and detachment) on the life of the
black servant Justina in her first novel A Study in Colour (1894); however, her
second novel, Lucilla: An Experiment (1896) reverts to a white protagonist.
The Jamaican Tom Redcam (Thomas Macdermot's pseudonym) devotes some
energy to giving a sympathetic portrayal of the black child Becka and her
family in Becka's Buckra Baby (1907), but only sporadic attention to the black
Fidelia in One Brown Girl And (1909); otherwise in that second work the
principal characters are various shades of brown as well as white, while the
blacks are caricatured and marginalised.9 The first novel of the Jamaican 'white
creole' writer H. G. De Lisser, Jane's Career (1914), is centred around the life of
the black servant Jane, and, as Ramchand observes, is "the first [West Indian
novel] in which the central character, the one whose feelings and thoughts
are explored in depth, is a Negro."10 De Lisser's second novel, Susan Proudleigh
(1915), again explores a black character. 1 De Lisser's subsequent novels,
however, discard a socialist agenda and relax into portrayals of the (brown
and white) middle and upper classes, often lapsing into reactionary (not to
mention lurid and sensationalist) perspectives. Alice Durie's sole work One
Jamaica Gal (1939) follows the line of Jane's Career and to a lesser extent A
Study in Colour by tracing the life story of the black protagonist Icilda.12 In
this work, like the others, the author's tone seems sympathetic but detached,
slightly condescending, interested mainly from an ethnographic point of view:
here is one Jamaica gal, and here is the story to answer the question asked
on the very last line, "Lawd, how she come here?" (80).
 "Here," incidentally, is death, a fate shared by Redcam's Becka; and the
fates of the other black women in these novels may not be as tragic but are
certainly not idyllic. For example, Justina in A Study in Colour and Jane in
Jane's Career achieve material success and societal advancement, but in both
cases the authors imply that they may have compromised their integrity.
Jane, de Lisser ironically notes, takes on the airs and graces of the same
middle-class people who had snubbed her all along when she fulfils her dream
of a white wedding and respectability. Spinner's Justina, having found out
that the no-good man to whom she has remained faithful for years, awaiting
his release from prison, has been dead for a long time, decides to accept the
offer of the old Irish shop owner who had long before invited her to be his
"housekeeper," so that she can raise her child properly:


9 Tom Redcam, Becka's Buckra Baby (Kingston: Times Printery, 1907); Tom Redcam,
One Brown Girl And (Kingston: Jamaica Times Printery, 1909).
1'H. G. de Lisser, Jane's Career(1913; New York: Africana Publishing, 1971); Kenneth
Ramchand, Introduction to Jane's Career (New York: Africana Publishing, 1971) ix.
Ramchand makes a similar observation in The West Indian Novel and its Background 57.
n H. G. de Lisser, Susan Proudleigh (London: Methuen, 1915).
12 Alice Durie, One Jamaica Gal (Kingston: The Jamaica Times, Ltd, 1939).