TAKING, OR SPURNING, THE IMPERIAL ROAD 157

comparison to the rollicking eccentrics or lovable heroes, all black, of his
other works.26 Indeed, the freshness and spontaneity achieved by Robert
Antoni in the voice of Vel is a major characteristic of Winkler's works.
 Winkler, in spurning the imperial road, follows in the footsteps of Mendes
and Mais. Like Mendes's first novel Pitch Lake, Winkler's first written (though
third published) novel, The Great Yacht Race, is semi-autobiographical and
deals with a group of brown and white middle- and upper-class people. Even
here, though, the long-serving Negro nurse, as seen in the persons of Lally
(in The Orchid House), Gip (in Christopher) and Christophine (in Wide Sargasso
Sea), appears in The Great Yacht Race in a distorted way. Winkler subverts
the figure of the ever loyal, ever faithful, substitute mother-figure nurse to
produce an eccentric caricature, the feisty "Mildred with black skin and no
teeth" (41) whose functions include clobbering her white master Fritzie on
the head with a broom whenever he comes home drunk, and warding off his
advances with similar weaponry.
 Like Mendes, Winkler thereafter moves away from such subject matter,
however, and in his subsequent works chooses to embrace the life of the
black poor. Like Mais, Winkler is unafraid of the black male as a protagonist.
The fisherman Zachariah in The Painted Canoe (1983), the madman Aloysius
in The Lunatic (1987) and the shopkeeper Baps in The Duppy (1997) are
Winkler's heroes.27 Zachariah and Aloysius are both from outside the main-
stream of the society, both fighting against great odds to survive. The school-
teacher-turned-shopkeeper Baps is both less marginal and less of a hero,
but he too comes out of the world of the black poor. Clearly, rather than
being overwhelmed and intimidated by his black male characters, Winkler
empathises with them (though one might suggest that as representatives of
black maleness these are disenfranchised, unthreatening examples).
 The childlike, innocent, trusting Aloysius in The Lunatic ranks easily as
one of Winkler's most memorable characters. His purity, goodness and
innocence, his sense of decency and propriety, his vulnerability and
loneliness, his need for love and family, all make him lovable to the reader.
Aloysius, in his refusal to kill the white landowner Busha during a break-in in
which he is an unwilling accomplice, his insistence on loving him despite
the latter's bigotry, represents compassion.
 Busha is placed in opposition to Aloysius in terms of privilege versus
want: Busha was born into wealth, whereas Aloysius could have been a
barrister (147) if poverty and deprivation had not crushed all hope. Busha is
an integral part of the community, and of the land while Aloysius is excluded


26 Anthony C. Winkler, The Great Yacht Race (Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1992).
27 Anthony C. Winkler, The Painted Canoe (Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1983);
The Lunatic (Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1987); The Duppy (Kingston: Kingston
Publishers, 1997).