Recovering our history through fiction

With reference to Freedom Come by Jean Goulbourne 

Carlong Publishers (Caribbean) Ltd.

History textbooks usually just give facts and information which many children find boring.  Historical fiction, on the other hand, can make those facts come alive and be quite entertaining.

Hidden behind the scenes in the history texts are events ranging from fascinating and awe inspiring to scary, depressing and sometimes comedic. Wars and conquests, romance, inventions, crusades, slavery and so many other topics provide rich material for the storyteller. It’s people who make history. Authors of historical fiction make those hidden scenes come alive. A single incident or experience could be expanded into a novel by building up the background of events leading to it, and the resulting consequences.

Why haven’t we done more storytelling about our history in the Caribbean? See previous post Historical stories in Caribbean children’s books    for some ideas on this.

Historical fiction can fall into two categories:

1. The setting is historical but people and events are entirely fictional.Time travel stories tend to do this e.g. there was a war, or a natural disaster at a particular time in history, but the story doesn’t dwell on the known historical characters or events. Sometimes an obscure fact in history can be taken out and expanded into a story.

2. Both setting and characters are factual with the author imaginatively expanding on aspects of the events – it could have happened, and this was probably what was happening behind the scenes that history records.

Writers of historical fiction need to remember that:

Plot must be clear and not railroaded by historical details

Historical details must be accurate

Characters must come alive

Illustrations must be relevant to the time period.

Obviously, research is a key for the writer of historical fiction who needs detail to make the story believable. The elements which make for good story are as important as the factual information – especially the use of sensory details. How did things look, taste, feel, smell and sound. These are very important challenges for the writer wanting to make the story come alive.

The author of Freedom Come, Jean Goulbourne, studied and taught history and evidently called upon her scholarship in writing these stories for children.

It isn’t often that we see slave children in stories or even in accounts of slavery. The more striking stories in Freedom Come are about slave children.

The author gives us a glimpse of what it must have been like for children in this era. In the story Cimarron! Cimarron! Goulbourne shows us two young boys taking a break from work (feeding the pigs) to play a little. The bookkeeper on the plantation catches them at play and whips them soundly. We feel the frustration of a way of life which has Alrick, the protagonist, threatening to take his life. Luckily for him, his father, who had escaped to join the free Maroons some years before, returns and rescues him and his mother. They safely escape to a better life in the mountains with the Maroons

Slaves on way to sell produce at market from  Freedom Come

In a gloomier tale, The Whipping, another slave child, this time a girl,  escapes through death. However, the author presents death as preferable to the slave life. In death she is welcomed by her ancestors and we get a feeling that she will be now at peace. This is a gripping first person story with details that make the slave experience come alive in personal ways. The death scene is presented as a celebration.

“There on the sands of a large and wonderful land was a crowd of black people; and the drums were beating and they were dancing; men and women, boys and girls; and the waves washed the shore and the drums beat and the trees waved their branches; and the drums beat and Ole Granpus came out of the crowds and into the sea and his hands were held upwards, welcoming me,and I knew. This was Africa. This was home.”

It is said that many slaves believed that death would carry them back to their home in Africa.The beliefs and superstitions of the slaves are skillfully woven into this story which is mostly about how the slaves themselves interacted with one another in this terrible dehumanizing era.

Slavery was an extremely harsh way of life and it is difficult to use it as a setting for children’s stories since so many of the experiences of the slaves were so painful, physically and emotionally and, no doubt, the kinds of experiences we would like to shield our children from. This collection of stories is meant for the 10 to 12+ age group.

Other stories in this collection deal with the experience of a Taino boy helping his village to celebrate with a feast to which he contributes wild ducks which we watch him catch, Taino style. Another story deals with boys in Port Royal, the famous city of the pirates. The boys learn, first hand from Peter, an old pirate, about one of the more famous raids carried out by the buccaneers -  the raid on  Panama City.  The last story is about the heroic journey of a boy who helped to carry a message to Daddy Sharpe (now a National Hero) on the eve of the Christmas Rebellion in Montego Bay, which helped to hasten the end of slavery.

All the stories bring the history of their era alive. Jean Goulbourne has won many awards and acclaim for her literary skills as a poet and storyteller. The poetic influence can often be seen in the language of her prose. This book is a very useful supplementary reader for students of our past.

Freedom Come was a runner up award winner in the 1999 Vic Reid Award for Children’s Literature, a competition hosted by the National Book Development Council of Jamaica.

Historical stories in Caribbean children’s books

There is not a long list of historical fiction written by Caribbean authors for Caribbean children.

Perhaps it is a psychological problem. Most of our ancestors were uprooted and alienated from their ancestral pasts by slavery, (Africans), indentureship (Indians and Chinese) and indeed it was alienation, too, for many of the Europeans who came. There are few pockets of Carib/Taino descendants- these were the original inhabitants of the Caribbean. Up to fairly recent times even the study of Caribbean history in schools didn’t exist.  Oral history carried some of the stories but modernization has all but wiped out this source. So now, we have to rely on our authors to bring the past alive, as only stories can do, for our children.

Plantation life, on which the Caribbean was built, was no bed of roses; difficult even for the ruling class. Slavery was demeaning and cruel, robbing both masters and slaves of their essential humanity.

A new culture had to be forged out of the disparate elements present in the Caribbean. It has been a painful process for the many, and I think that, as a people, we would rather forget the shame and the pain.

But we can’t change history and as the popular saying goes, we have to know where we are coming from to know where we are going. But,how to deal with it, so that it is not merely sentimental, or damning, or so politically incorrect, in modern terms, that we ‘fraid of it? For example, much as we laud the Maroons for standing up to the British in Jamaica, there are still pockets of people who think that they sold out after they gained their freedom from slavery by helping the planters to catch runaway slaves - so maybe they’re not so heroic after all???

It is also difficult to emerge from the brainwashing which taught us that only European culture was valid. So our heroes couldn’t be heroic. They were ragtag blacks clad in osnaburg, and wicked in their wish for freedom from the masters who enslaved them. Their acts of defiance  - poison, burning the cane fields, rioting - were ‘evil’ acts; by a ‘lawless’ people.That’s how the chroniclers of that past saw the slaves.

Can we, in our stories, give our children a concept of heroism which transcends this? Can we give them stories which equate to the Robin Hoods of the English past, or any of the other European heroes who, in one way or another, changed life for their people. Can osnaburg be made to seem as glamorous as ‘men in tights?’

Of course, in the twentieth century, we got freedom songs and freedom singers and freedom fighters who gained international respect. In Jamaica, our governments have also created national heroes out of past political activists, and have declared a national holiday when we remember them. However, and this is something I usually point out to the aspiring writers for children in my classes, most of what we give the children to read are dry accounts of their dates and the deeds which made them famous. We give them posters of lifeless faces. We expect modern children to automatically understand why (and be enthusiastic about) people who fought for freedom from slavery and for Independence for our country are heroic.. These heroes do not come alive for the modern child, not in the way that fiction could make them.

Writers like Vic Reid (Jamaica) have written compelling historical fiction for children, but we need a lot more of this.

Here are two anecdotes from my own experience.  Draw your own conclusions.

1^st anecdote

When my older grandchildren were about 6 and 7 years old, I was telling them some stories from our past, notably what slavery meant. I told them about the slaves being dissatisfied and wanting their freedom. So, I asked, what do you think they did? The girl was quick to answer. “They went up to JBC to demonstrate.”

(JBC was the former government television station. She was interpreting out of her experience watching television what people did when they were unhappy with their situation.)

2^nd anecdote

Some time ago, I spent one week in Grenada, teaching writing for children, at what was then the Extra-mural Centre. I don’t know if they call them national heroes, but one of their influential political figures was T.A.Marryshow. The Centre was actually in what used to be his house, I was told.  After one class when I had introduced the topic of historical fiction, some students and I were in the car park, below the building. In St. George’s, on every level you have to look up to the next. One of the students remarked that her family used to live in an area below the house. She recalled having seen Marryshow at one of the windows looking out with a ‘trumpet’ at his ear. She also said that the children used to raid the plum tree in his yard, despite being afraid of him. I pointed out that she could use this as basis for a children’s story about the life of Marryshow. Such a story would certainly bring him alive for the children. I don’t think anybody took me up on this.

I like to remind my students that all these important men (and women) would have had children in their lives in some way They would have been fathers, uncles, godfathers etc. How they did or did not interact with the (fictional) children around them would help to give them faces children could understand.

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Next post I will review Freedom Come by Jean Goulbourne:published by Carlong

 Publishers (Caribbean) Ltd. This book contains five stories about children in Jamaica’s

distant historical  past: Tainos, buccaneers and children in slavery.

And after that I will return to a discussion of Diane Browne’s novels A Tumbling World ... A

Time of Fire and The Ring and the Roaring Water, both time travel stories which take us back to

closer historical times in the twentieth century.

P.S. Since writing this post, I have been delighted to read Gwyneth Harold Davidson's Young Heroes of the Caribbean which marries both the history of the seven Jamaican Heroes with the story of a contemporary 10 year old boy. Title: Young Heroes of the Caribbean. I understand she intends to make it a series. Get a copy here:
www.amazon.com/Young-Heroes-Caribbean-Common-Destiny-ebook/dp/B00B3CUVE4/ 

Hazel Campbell's (me) books available at https://www.lmhpublishing.com/children 
AND
http://www.sangstersbooks.com/products/children-s-books/category/caribbean