Volume 29, Number 9 · May 27, 1982

Slums of Empire

By Darryl Pinckney
Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack
by Austin Clarke

Ediciones Casa de las Americas (Havana), 188 pp., price not given

Crown Jewel
by Ralph de Boissière

Allison and Busby (distributed by Schocken), 361 pp., $14.95

Dr. Johnson once offered a toast at Oxford: 'Here's to the next insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies.' That was pure mischief: though Johnson loathed the slave trade, he did not much care for black people. But the slaves in the Caribbean were not kidding. Two hundred disordered years later the island colonies were baptized island nations. 'Their sun that would not set was going down,' as one of Derek Walcott's poems has it.



Review, 3439 words

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