TAKING, OR SPURNING, THE IMPERIAL ROAD 155

into the expected pattern. It... questioned the values which everyone in his
class had been taught to accept. . ."18 Mais's interest in the poor black
Jamaican may have coincided with the birth in the 1930s of a cultural
movement led by Edna Manley and others which, in its promotion of a new
nationalist pride of identity, encouraged a romanticisation of the Jamaican
peasantry and working class in creative work.19 Mais's three novels, The Hills
Were Joyful Together (1953), Brother Man (1954) and Black Lightning (1955),
were all concerned with the plight of the poor black Jamaican, male as well
as female.20 As Sylvia Wynter said, "Mais ... was near-white but he became
perhaps, the Caribbean writer most closely identified with those who walked
with hunger and destitution the people of the shantytown jungles."21
 Fifty years later, we ask: How do contemporary white West Indian writers
address these issues? The faithful nurse /obeahwoman appears again as the
only developed black character in a number of recent works by white West
Indians. In the first novel by Trinidadian writer Lawrence Scott, Witchbroom
(1992), she appears as Josephine/ Antoinetta, and in the first novel by
Trinidadian/Bahamian writer Robert Antoni, Divina Trace (1992), as nurse-
cum-obeahwoman Evelina.22 In the novel by Robert Antoni's brother Brian,
Paradise Overdose (1994), she appears as one of two black characters, as
Evalina.23 In Witchbroom, the stereotype proves to be that of both the good
and the bad negro: Josephine/Antoinetta is revealed to have a love-hate
relationship with her mistress. And in Divina Trace, the faithful nurse
stereotype is given a twist: Evelina is revealed to be the daughter of her
hated master.
 In Robert Antoni's second novel, Blessed is the Fruit (1997) the faithful
nurse is once again featured, as one of two first-person narrators. 24 Here,
very interestingly, the author seems more comfortable in his rendering of
the black character, Vel, than that of the white character, Vel's white mistress


18 John Hearne, "Roger Mais: Part of a Life" 8.
19 In fact, this romanticisation of the underprivileged was part of an international
movement and, as Petrine Archer-Straw notes in her essay "Vision and Design: Where
Nationalism Meets Art and Crafts", Edna Manley herself may well have been
influenced by the British art theorist Roger Fry (Fifty Years -Fifty Artists, ed. Petrine
Archer-Straw [Kingston: Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts-lan
Randle Publishers, 2000]).
20 Roger Mais, The Hills Were Joyful Together (London: Cape, 1953); Brother Man
(London: Cape, 1954); Black Lightning (London: J. Cape, 1955).
21 Sylvia Wynter, "Strangers at the Gate: Caribbean Novelists in Search of Identity",
Sunday Gleaner, 18 January 18 1959: 14.
22 Lawrence Scott, Witchbroom (1992; Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1993);
Robert Antoni, Divina Trace (New York: The Overlook Press, 1992).
23 Brian Antoni, Paradise Overdose (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
24 Robert Antoni, Blessed Is the Fruit (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).