The concluding words of Erna Brodber's The Rainmaker's Mistake, a novel prompted in part by the two-hundredth anniversary of the 1807 Act to Abolish the Slave Trade in Britain's Caribbean Colonies, affirm its engagement with history and historiography, emphasizing the need for Caribbean writers of the twenty-first century to search the past – uncover its traumas, its mysteries, and its treasures – in order to make sense of the present and project a future “in the free.” Brodber's work, of course, is part of a much larger and longer conversation among Caribbean novelists about what it means “to search and to reproduce and to cultivate.” To explore the implications of this conversation, my essay focusses on this various and vexed cultural work as performed in three key Caribbean novels: E. L. Joseph's Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole, published in 1838, the year that “full freedom” was granted by the British Parliament to the enslaved population of the British West Indies; Paule Marshall's 1969 The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, produced during a period of newly won independence for many Anglo-Caribbean nations, including her parents' native Barbados in 1968; and, finally, Brodber's 2007 “Afrofuturistic” novel The Rainmaker's Mistake.Footnote ²

My selection of these three works, with publication dates ranging well over a century and a half, is not in any way intended to suggest a linear chronology of the Caribbean novel. Such an attempt, to my mind, raises problems akin to those Raphael Dalleo discusses in his study of Caribbean literature and the public sphere: in the Caribbean context – “with its multiple histories and temporalities” – literary periodization is “fraught with pitfalls.”Footnote ³ Drawing on Peter Hulme, Dalleo reminds us that the universalist claims of Enlightenment historiography, grounded in notions of linearity and successively staged “progress,” infuse acts of historical periodization as surely as they infused nineteenth-century colonialism – and, for that matter, colonialism as practiced throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Footnote ⁴ In many ways, the novels I focus on here engage with the distortions and elisions produced by Eurocentric historiography, most obviously those surrounding Atlantic slavery and its legacies.Footnote ⁵ In doing so they reveal as well “the various ways that writers have sought to speak to the region's social and political realities” – and to individual readers – “in different historical moments.”Footnote ⁶ By writing to and through critical junctures in Caribbean history like those mentioned above, the works I examine reveal the push and pull of historicity and fictionality – and the promise and limitations of both.

This push and pull opens a space in which we can scrutinize notions of a fixed past, an opening that marks these works as “historical novels,” particularly if we acknowledge the possibilities suggested by José de Piérola's “working definition” of the form. Writing of the ambiguities surrounding historical fiction in the Latin American context, Piérola points out that despite the explosion of historical novels produced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and of scholarly interest in them, despite the form's lengthy genealogy, a clear theorization of the historical novel remains elusive. In large part, he argues, this is because no satisfactory definition of the form has been articulated. “The historical novel,” he writes, “is a special case in literature. It seems to combine ‘facts' taken from the historical record with freely invented fictional elements”; this combination, he continues, “is done in a way that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate which is which: it seems to be a hybrid of two genres, but refuses to be read as either.”Footnote ⁷ For Piérola the seemingly oppositional relationship inherent in the form offers the basis for his working definition: “The historical novel is not a genre, as it was previously believed, but a ‘mode of writing’ that creates and sustains an unresolved tension between history and fiction.”Footnote ⁸

By emphasizing this tension, we can put Caribbean historical novels from different periods, shaped by different underlying ideologies, in productive conversation with each other. The novels examined here engage a shared past marked by the experiences born of Atlantic slavery and its legacies, while the authors' different “presents” inform their role as historical novelists and actors. Together this reveals the power of the form itself as cultural (re)producer: peculiarly Caribbean, the texts provide glimpses into how history has been read, shaped, and produced by the region's novelists across periods, including those that deal explicitly with acts of E/emancipation – legislative, political, cultural. The shared epistemological–historiographic project of these novels – the revisioning of plantocratic history and the recovery of lost histories – is clearly an important part of the cultural work that they and their authors perform. But, as I hope to show in my reading of each, it is only one part of that work. In choosing to write historical novels, as Piérola observes, their authors are also engaged in a hermeneutical enterprise, relying on the reader's recognition that “history” and historiography are integral components of their “fictions.” In this sense, Joseph, Marshall, and Brodber invite readers not only to recognize the tensions between “facts” and “fictions,” but also to ask how that tension is created and sustained and – given its irresolvability – why.Footnote ⁹

In this essay I want to offer one approach through which we can explore these questions as they relate to three historical novels yoked by their Caribbean-ness but produced at very different historical moments: the shared practice of novelistic archaeology. In using this phrase I intentionally invoke Toni Morrison's description of “literary archaeology” in “The Site of Memory” and Jenny Sharpe's adoption of it in Ghosts of Slavery. As Morrison outlines the process, “On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.”Footnote ¹⁰ The archaeological labor implied but not spelled out by Morrison – the necessary physical act of digging down through history's layers to unearth and uncover – recalls Ian Baucom's description of the “fatal Atlantic ‘beginning’ of the modern” as “an ending without end”: “Because history,” Baucom writes, “comes to us not only as flash or revelation but piling up. Because this is, not was. Because this is the Atlantic, now. Because all of it is now, it is always now, even for you who never was there.”Footnote ¹¹ As each novel demonstrates, the “you who never was there” – whether the novelist, the fictional(ized) characters whose stories have been “improperly buried” or who are engaged in recovering such stories within the novel's plot, or the reader – has recourse to the archaeologist's “bag of tricks”: digging up, sifting, sorting, and reconstructing remains that may seem “fixed” in history, but ultimately are not.

This essay then, is not about “fixing” Caribbean (literary) history so much as “unfixing” it. It illustrates how Joseph, Marshall, and Brodber engage in literary acts of self-emancipation by writing stories about history, each one demonstrating how their mode of writing – that is, their engagement with the historical novel – reflects the peculiarity of their own moment and that moment's relation to past, present, and future.

Of the numerous Creole novels produced during the early nineteenth century, Edward Lanza Joseph's Warner Arundell can be read as an exemplary work, its New World setting and Creole protagonist contributing to early articulations of self-consciously Caribbean rather than metropolitan identity. Like other Caribbean novels that preceded it, such as Montgomery; or, The West-Indian Adventurer (1812–13) and Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), the white Creole perspective contained in its pages was promoted as a counter to metropolitan projections of white Creoles as degenerates, particularly by abolitionists who equated the planter class with barbarous tyranny. Joseph's novel, however, appears not as a “party work” – a novelized defense of slavery like Marly; or, A Planter's Life in Jamaica (1828) – but as a rewriting of slavery's history. For Joseph, after all, slavery was over. Even so, Warner Arundell must negotiate the “reality” of Emancipation; it must, in other words, reconcile its (re)production of history to the actuality of an event that had been so anxiously anticipated in its literary precursors.

Those earlier novels are marked by an oddly nostalgic strain – odd because the “loss” of planter culture based on slavery was being mourned by the West Indian plantocracy before Emancipation actually occurred. Joseph's novel, in contrast, engages with Caribbean history from its “right,” post-slavery side, no longer compelled to defend an institution burdened by the weight of immorality. This is not to suggest, of course, that slavery is ignored or omitted in Warner Arundell. Nor am I arguing that the novel does not romanticize the pre-Emancipation past – it does. However, Warner Arundell looks toward a post-Emancipation future with confidence rather than foreboding, a confidence explicitly tied to Joseph's appropriation of a key historical event: the Grenadian revolution led by Julien Fédon in 1795–96. Facilitating the novel's work as historiographic (re)producer, Joseph's incorporation of Fédon clearly evokes the tensions between “facts” and “fiction” as generated and sustained in the Caribbean historical novel.

Given his position as a white plantocratic author writing at the end of institutionalized slavery, Joseph's reworking of the “historical” Fédon – described in contemporary published accounts as a bloodthirsty archfiend – may seem surprising. Whereas the colonial record condemns Fédon absolutely, in particular for executing the English lieutenant governor and forty-seven other prisoners during the revolution's early days,Footnote ¹² Joseph casts the rebel leader in a more sympathetic light. His rewriting is aided by the fact that the body of the actual Fédon was never recovered, allowing Joseph to tell a different version of Grenadian history than that commonly found in the colonial archive.Footnote ¹³ Joseph's Fédon, for example, relates his “true” motivations for leading the revolt in an impassioned speech to Warner's father, making it clear that while he may have been influenced by French Revolutionary ideals, his aims were far nobler than those of his French counterparts: “I aimed at emancipating the slaves,” he insists; “I wished to make the negro respected despite his inky skin, to induce the mulatto to consider himself a man, although his brown complexion told him he was the son of the tyrannical white man. This archipelago” continues Fédon,

Fédon's speech is powerful, his language in some respects anticipating Frantz Fanon's indictment of the psychological damage inflicted by colonial regimes. But ultimately the “uncovered” history that Joseph provides through his fictionalized Fédon speaks of a failed revolution: Fédon survives but he leaves his homeland in despair, to wander the archipelago for twenty-five years as a “spectral mulatto,” as Arundell describes him, haunted by the atrocities committed in his name during the insurrection.

Fédon's suffering is intensified by the presence of another fictionalized character, “Old Julie Sanois, the celebrated sibyl of St. Domingo,” once adviser to Toussaint L'Ouverture, and later companion to Fédon during his exile. Passing a quarter-century moving restlessly from island to island reduces the once-feared rebel leader to a ghostlike presence, transforming the once passionate advocate of racial justice into a racially ambiguous figure: his skin, Arundell recalls, “had such a pallid hue, and his visage seemed so cadaverous, that it was not easy to decide from what race or races he was descended.”Footnote ¹⁵ Old Julie, by contrast, is described as having “skin of glossy blackness, and her eye clear enough to belong to a person who had only attained middle age,” despite being nearly a hundred years old. Whereas Fédon is a walking skeleton, on the brink of death – in fact, desirous of death – Old Julie is described in terms that emphasize her Africanness (according to white writers of the period). She appears “ageless,” possesses prophetic powers like other practitioners of African religions, and is strongly distrustful of the “white cockroach” Arundell.Footnote ¹⁶

Despite the power Old Julie exercises over Fédon – and by extension the combined hold of “Africa” and the Haitian Revolution on the Caribbean imagination – the ex-revolutionary is “liberated” to become a reassuring figure consigned to a revolutionary past that is now safely over.Footnote ¹⁷ This move signals Joseph's departure from contemporary nineteenth-century historical novels of the kind described by Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel. Unlike the European humanists who, according to Lukács, acknowledged “the necessity of revolutions in the past” and saw in them “the foundation for all that is reasonable and worthy of affirmation” in their present, Joseph's Eurocentric humanism is tempered by the Caribbean setting of his historical fiction.Footnote ¹⁸ The writers Lukács examines, for example, may have agreed that the achievements of the French Revolution led to positive social changes (while at the same time considering any “new revolution” unnecessary), but Joseph and his fellow white Creoles read the history of revolution quite differently, particularly as it played out in emancipatory actions like the Haitian Revolution and the Grenadian Revolution. Thus, even as the historical fiction of, say, Walter Scott was influential in early Caribbean literature, as Tim Watson points out, white Creole writers perceived a “crucial difference between the highlanders of Waverley and the black peasantry of the Caribbean.”Footnote ¹⁹ Even at the moment of Warner Arundell's production, when institutionalized slavery's end meant the end of slave rebellions, plantocratic (re)writings of Caribbean history still had to contend with “the historical forces driving black insurgency from its pages.”Footnote ²⁰ Joseph's confrontation with these historical forces results, then, not in the romanticization of revolution, as in Scott's historical novels, but in an attempt to reveal (black) revolution's disastrous effects and thereby “rescue” Caribbean history. Indeed, the only way to stop the spread of these effects is to reimpose a plantocratic order that no longer “needs” institutional slavery, but whose power is reified through “the myth of history” being (re)produced in Joseph's present and laid out in the post-Emancipation future he envisions.

Crucially, this reproduction is made possible by Joseph's Fédon, who unwittingly undertakes the task of archaeological recovery when he sets out to find buried treasure. After the death of Old Julie, Fédon returns at last to Grenada, where in the final days of the rebellion he had buried a stolen fortune. When Fédon attempts to recover it, however, he finds the treasure already plundered – except for “a great number of papers belonging principally to [Arundell's] late father.”Footnote ²¹ As a last gesture of repentance Fédon returns the papers to Arundell (whose own history assumes the shape of a quest), thereby ensuring the restoration of the Creole's patrimony in the form of the estates left to him by his father. Here, I argue, Joseph's appropriation of the historical Fédon, the embellishment of his story within a story that concludes with this title transfer, does not gesture toward “the possibility of racial solidarity and a truly modern Creole future that owes its debt to … slave revolts” like Fédon's.Footnote ²² Rather it anticipates what would become for the post-Emancipation ruling classes a bedrock of land policy that features heavily in Marshall's and Brodber's novels, one aimed at maintaining the plantocracy's power: the retention of legal title to land that was systematically denied to freed slaves and their descendants.Footnote ²³

Such policies complemented the ideological work performed in a novel like Warner Arundell, the work of “putting down” rebellions – through military reprisals and the act of writing their histories – like those led by Fédon. In this, Joseph's historical novel seeks to represent, and also to erase, internal unevenness, but not (as in European historical fiction of the same period) in the service of national consolidation.Footnote ²⁴ Rather, the “new” post-Emancipation plantocratic order was not wedded to the nation-state per se, but rather to an economic model predicated on increasingly globalized markets. As Sylvia Wynter explains in the context of a later Jamaican revolt, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, “The world had to be kept safe for the market economy … History, to help in this task had to be distorted. The myth of history was used by the plantation to keep its power secure.”Footnote ²⁵ I would argue that Warner Arundell's depiction of Fédon, culminating in the ex-revolutionary's excavation and restoration of the white planter's “rightful” property, becomes part of this myth, one disseminated through its peculiar iteration of the Caribbean historical novel. In so doing it becomes part of the region's (literary) history that Caribbean novelists like Marshall and Brodber engage.

Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, the Timeless People appeared in 1969, well over a century after Warner Arundell's appearance and slavery's end. Her “present” (and that of the novel) comprises, of course, a different moment than does Joseph's, and her historical fiction requires and performs a different kind of intervention in literary and colonial history than that of Warner Arundell. In the context of early postcolonial Caribbean writings, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People reflects similar attempts by Marshall's contemporaries, the region's artists and activists, to transform, in their present, “the antagonistic energies” of the colonial past “into a creative syncretism.” As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin describe it, Wilson Harris's “intuitive reading” of Marshall's novel (among others) acknowledges that the novel's prevailing historical and political reality is a destructive and continuing (neo)imperialism, but in its exploration of that surface “historical reality” it also inevitably exposes “an underlying imaginative imperative towards cross-culturality, Creolization, hybridization, and catalysis. Imperialism … is thus perpetually undermined by a persisting regenerative seed, masked perhaps as intuition or dream.”Footnote ²⁶ Harris's description of the play between surface “reality” and underlying imaginative imperatives, of the revelations wrought by acts of exploration and (under)mining, captures my sense of the work performed through Marshall's novelistic archaeology: in Chosen Place, Timeless People it is clear that she understands the transformative power of such labor, and that it can only be tapped by going “deep down” through the layers of the past, to a “depth … which only a few [are] permitted” to reach.Footnote ²⁷

The ongoing process of engaging Caribbean history's depths leaves little room for easy reconciliation between past and present – if, indeed, such reconciliation is possible or desirable given the grim realities of life on Bourne Island, Marshall's fictional every-island. Long after the end of slavery and the establishment of “independence,” such realities remain evident in the impoverishment and isolation of Bournehills, Bourne Island's most destitute district, where much of the narrative action takes place. The Bournehills residents are the “timeless people” of the novel's title, the stoic, seemingly resigned and passive villagers who endure and for whom “yesterday comes like today.”Footnote ²⁸ But there is a particular reason for Bournehills's “failure” to get into “the modern swing of things,” the revelation of which is directly related to the novel's historiographic project.

This project is most visible in the various accounts of the Pyre Hill Revolt, which took place in the Bournehills district in 1795–96, the same year as Fédon's Rebellion and all the other revolutions bemoaned by Joseph's Warner Arundell. Led by Cuffee Ned, the “only real hero” the island has ever had, the revolt is “the only bit of history … worth mentioning on Bourne Island.”Footnote ²⁹ This, at least, is the opinion of Merle Vaughan Kinbona, “articulate mulatta, spokeswoman of the island's self-respect, fiercely, petulantly, frustratedly committed to her little ‘rock.’”Footnote ³⁰ Much of Merle's frustration arises from another of her roles: that of island historian, in effect, the curator of its history, including the history of Cuffee Ned's Revolt. Represented in the novel as an actual historical figure, Cuffee Ned assumes a “reality” that is never disputed by the novel's characters – not even by the headmaster who fires Merle for including Cuffee in her history lessons at the Bournehills school. Indeed, the “story” of the revolt is substantiated by a (fictionalized) colonial archive, print sources consulted and invoked by the various characters tasked with relating it, an “official” corroboration of local popular knowledge.

The first telling of the revolt illustrates the fraught, sometimes oppositional, sometimes productive relationship between official and popular versions of history. Driving into Bournehills with her American guests – Saul Amron, the sympathetic anthropologist who has come to the island to lead an NGO aid project, and his patrician wife Harriet – Merle stops the car to explain the significance of Pyre Hill. The landform, as described in the third-person narration, “appeared to have been almost totally destroyed by some recent fire. It might have only just stopped burning. You expected to see the last of the smoke drifting up from its charred sides … The ground, you were certain, would still be hot underfoot.”Footnote ³¹ This – the perpetually smoldering physical reminder of revolt – attests to the hold that Cuffee Ned exercises more than a century and a half after his death. Referring to the “little fracas” with self-conscious irony, Merle describes how Cuffee and his fellow rebels burned “one of the biggest estates on the island,” owned by Percy Bryam, “the man who owned all of Bournehills and everyone in it in the beginning.”Footnote ³² The fire, she insists, burned for five years, addressing Saul's skeptical look by invoking the authority of “the books.” To back up her claims, she calls on her friend and Saul's assistant Allen to validate her recital. Allen, who had participated on an earlier aid project and has returned to the island, “obediently” tells “the story of the revolt … speaking in his scrupulously objective manner” and opening with the requisite truth claim: “according to the historical accounts.”Footnote ³³

Despite its corroborative role, the authority of documented colonial history (contained in works like Joseph's History of Trinidad and Warner Arundell) is suspect, particularly to the degree it detracts and distracts from the “lived history” of Bournehills residents. This tension between recorded (and thus, in a way, completed) history and quotidian, still-living, not-over-yet history reveals itself in the ongoing debates between Ferguson and Stinger over the details of the revolt. Assuming an aura of ritual, the argument between these two Bournehills men – the former a mechanic at the district's only cane mill, the latter a cane cutter – is not about the actuality of the revolt, but about the (in)fallibility of written colonial history: Ferguson argues that Cuffee Ned was able to fend off the British regiment sent to capture him for six months, citing – like Allen – the “historical sources”:

Stinger remains unimpressed by Ferguson's assertions, insisting that “it was only two, three months at the most” that Cuffee held out against the government forces. His pronouncement, though, is rooted not in a desire to minimize Cuffee's feat, but in the need to get the facts right. For Stinger, these facts aren't confined to written history – access to which is denied him – but can be deduced from what he knows of life and has filtered through a skeptical pragmatism. At the end of this particular round of the debate, the question remains unresolved – the rumshop owner Delbert pronounces that the only thing certain is that “old Cuffee held out to the end.”Footnote ³⁵ Even so, Stinger's quiet calm grants him an authority greater than Ferguson's passionate vociferations, despite the weight of “the big book.”Footnote ³⁶

Much has been written about Cuffee Ned and the Pyre Hill Revolt; its centrality to Marshall's narrative is impossible to overlook.Footnote ³⁷ But little has been said about Stinger's role in the novel's historiographic project. Like many of the novel's secondary characters, Stinger is, for the most part, a West Indian type, displaying traits and behaviors that attest to the novel's verisimilitude in depicting Caribbean people and places. More specifically, Stinger represents the Afro-Caribbean peasant, a figure that has played a prominent role in Caribbean history and in the development of the twentieth-century West Indian novel; that is, “the novel written by the West Indian about the West Indian reality.”Footnote ³⁸ The West Indian novelist, explains George Lamming, was prompted by an imperative to look “at what had traditionally been ignored,” specifically the West Indian peasant, who became, “through the [West Indian] novelist's eye, a living existence,” restored to “his true and original status of personality.”Footnote ³⁹ Although Marshall's place as a West Indian novelist is complicated by the fact that she was born in the US of Barbadian parents, her desire to bring in what – as late as 1969 – had traditionally been ignored is palpable in her depiction of Stinger.

This is not to say that the novel always succeeds in raising Stinger's character to the “status of personality”; he is, after all, a secondary figure. More importantly, there are times when his role is compromised by his relationship with Saul, who is drawn to him “by the easy, quietly authoritative way he spoke of his work and his sober introspective air; and above all, by something [Saul] sensed behind the eyes half-hidden under the cap he wore, an obscure sadness.”Footnote ⁴⁰ When Saul asks Stinger's permission to “come and watch him work sometime,” Stinger agrees: “Yes … you must come sometime, ‘cause in a manner of speaking maybe that's what the old place is here for, for people like yourself to come and see what another man's life is like.”Footnote ⁴¹ In one sense, Stinger's response reduces Bournehills – “chosen,” after all, because it remains “fixed and rooted in that other time”Footnote ⁴² – to spectacle, a visual aid for the edification of “people like” Saul and, perhaps, for many of the novel's readers; that is, well-intentioned, liberal, and sympathetic outsiders. Read in this way, the relationship between the two (unintentionally?) replicates the ages-old relationship between liberal metropolitans and oppressed, peripheral subjects who come under their temporary gaze, reminiscent of the way the sufferings of the enslaved were displayed to provoke a moral indignation that in itself became a source of pleasure for abolitionists in England.Footnote ⁴³

Certainly Saul's experience watching Stinger and his gang harvest sugarcane – the most redolent symbol of enslavement and evidence of the continuing hold of the plantation machine – results in a near epiphany for Saul, a first step toward understanding the mystery of Bournehills. Initially Saul watches amazed, impressed by Stinger's “highly concentrated” strength, the way he slashes “without pause at the canes, his billhook describing the same beautifully controlled downward arc as in the rumshop” on the night Saul saw him arguing with Ferguson.Footnote ⁴⁴ As the day wears on, however, Saul witnesses a “transformation,” the cane cutter “gradually shrinking, becoming smaller and painfully bent, old. By early afternoon all that was left to him it appeared were the shriveled bones and muscles within the drawn sac of skin and the one arm flailing away with a mind and will of its own.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Described through the lens of Saul's sun-dazed eyes, Stinger is reduced from the “living existence” and “personality” of Lamming's celebrated peasant, to the arm and hand attached to a billhook that appeared – when Saul first encountered Stinger – “almost part of the man's hand … something either grafted on or that he'd been born with: an extra limb nature had bestowed upon him to equip him for his world.”Footnote ⁴⁶

But even though the novel comes close to exploiting Stinger's labor for the benefit of Saul's education, the transformation Saul sees is and is not “real,” just as Bournehills is and is not “real.” What Saul believes he witnesses is real in the sense that it dramatizes the brutality of the Caribbean cane cutter's daily toil, unchanged from the “then” of slavery to the “now” of Marshall's novel, from the “then” of 1969 to the even more recent “now” of 2007. As Hilary Beckles points out in an essay marking the bicentennial commemorations of the Act to Abolish the Slave Trade, “For most of the Caribbean population,”

At the same time, however, what Saul sees of the legacy shouldered by Stinger is “unreal,” his sight is impaired, his vision incomplete: stunned, Saul leaves the field with its unending rows of cane, unable to watch anymore, a retreat that he is ashamed of. The fact that Stinger remains fixed in Saul's mind's eye as an old and shrunken man, beaten by the harshness of Bournehills's “hell on earth,” however, does not mean that he is forever imprisoned in that moment. In fact, Stinger's dignity is affirmed by his resilience, publicly celebrated every year when he plays the part of Cuffee Ned in the annual carnival procession.

In this crucial scene, Stinger appears to transcend his role as estate field hand to become the legendary rebel leader, “dressed according to the description of Cuffee in the old accounts at the library,” down to the last detail: “Even Stinger's normally mild reflective face had taken on Cuffee's expression as described in the accounts and was suddenly shrewd, clenched and coldly purposeful as he crept up” on the sleeping Bryam (played by Ferguson).Footnote ⁴⁸ But although Stinger's features appear to “take on” those of Cuffee, they remain his own, as does the weapon that Stinger/Cuffee Ned carries, “the billhook that was like part of [Stinger's] hand flashing in the sun.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Both tool and weapon, the billhook becomes, like Stinger himself, emblematic of both exploited labor and resistance. This duality signals the push by Caribbean novelists to move beyond the categories imposed on Caribbean subjects, to be either quiescent workers or instigators of armed rebellion, the two poles that, until recently, historians of slavery tended to mark out as the only available responses to enslavement.

The possibilities generated by that collapsed binary are celebrated even more triumphantly than the firing of Bryam's estate and the planter's execution. The most joyously enacted parts of the procession are devoted to what the Bournehills marchers see as the greatest accomplishment of the revolt, the three-year period of “real” independence during which Cuffee and his self-liberated band reject the plantation machine and monocrop agricultural practices in favor of the “plot” – that is, the cultivation of provision grounds that, according to Wynter, is at “the roots of [folk] culture” in the Caribbean.Footnote ⁵⁰ For nearly three years after the burning of Pyre Hill, sing the Bournehills marchers, their ancestors lived like other self-liberated people throughout the Caribbean,

Most tellingly, their greatest achievement in the eyes of their descendants was that “They had worked together! … They had been a People!”Footnote ⁵²

Marshall's rejection – like Joseph's, ironically – of the kind of nation building at work in nineteenth-century European historical novels, revolves around the perceived need to redefine “nation,” not in terms of the state, but in a pan-Caribbean syncretic model rooted in diasporic experience. As Grenadian drummer Caldwell Taylor describes it, “Nation is the community that is brought into being (and held) together in acts of creative collaboration undertaken by individuals on the basis of their ties of blood and/or other real or imagined bonds.”Footnote ⁵³ Like the ties celebrated in Marshall's depiction of the Nation Dance in Praisesong for the Widow, such bonds are continually renewed through significant public displays like the Bournehills Carnival performance. As Natasha Barnes points out, the annual reenactment of the Pyre Hill Revolt is widely recognized by critics as “the street drama through which the repressed history of black resistance finds its actualization and apotheosis”:

It is important to recognize, however, that, important as is the carnival performance to the affirmation of the eighteenth-century rebels' heroism, its public staging is not the only point of access to repressed histories. The key players in the masque – Ferguson, Stinger, Stinger's wife Gwen, and all the others – have routine access through another kind of performance, that of their everyday labor. Like the carnival pageant's reenactments of the long enforced march of enslavement and of Cuffee Ned's capture and execution that bookend the depictions of heroic revolt and temporary independence, the daily material existence of the Bournehills villagers is a painful “part of the story,” a central, though “unpalatable,” part of their history. In presenting these multiple points of entry, Chosen Place, Timeless People acknowledges that history is not so much repressed as woven – through Marshall's novelistic act of “creative syncretism” – into the fabric of Bournehill life, as inextricably as Stinger's billhook seems grafted to his body, to his self.Footnote ⁵⁵

Merle's awareness of history's quotidian presence is also articulated through the novel's representation of her body, her self. As she well understands, her very presence – as the illegitimate child of a planter and estate worker – serves as a reminder of the brutal side of the plantation machine's (re)productive labor, of coercive sexual practices that, in 1924 when she was born, “should have long been past.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Part black, part white, descendant of slaveholders and of enslaved people, Merle confronts many of the same dilemmas faced by her literary sisters, other mixed-race women in Caribbean fiction, like Michelle Cliff's Clair in Abeng and Erna Brodber's Ella in Myal. And like them, she must confront history head-on – in her case, through the formal study of history at “London U.” Of her time in London Merle “never, but never, talks” in publicFootnote ⁵⁷ – with the exception of a loaded but brief commentary on her university experience:

It is hardly surprising that Merle cannot seem to wake from the Joycean nightmare, particularly given the contents of her bedroom, where she hides herself when she suffers emotional breakdowns. The room – like the “horrors” experienced by Stinger and Gwen and the other cane cutters on a daily basis – is described through Saul's eyes, in this case as a kind of museum, “filled with furniture taken from the old estate house built by Duncan Vaughan generations ago” and containing “any number of faded prints and drawings depicting life long ago in places like Bournehills.”

These include images of “black figures at work in the fields that looked deceptively pleasant in the old prints, and filing in long columns up the ramps to the sugar mills with the canes on their backs bending them double. There was even a print showing them bound to the millwheel.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Overwhelming them all, however, is the largest and most disturbing, vivid reminder of how they arrived in Bournehills:

Having seen the room and felt its oppressive weight, Saul feels he can finally see all of Bournehills “for what it was at its deepest level.” He recognizes that, like the room, “it, too, was perhaps a kind of museum … where one not only felt that other time existing intact, still alive, a palpable presence beneath the everyday reality, but saw it as well at every turn, often without realizing it.”Footnote ⁶¹

That Saul's newly found ability to recognize the strata of past and present as a kind of palimpsest is made possible by his visit to the “museum” comprising Merle's bedroom and the world of Bournehills immediately outside its door invites the same kinds of question as are raised by his near-epiphany in the cane fields. That is, who benefits from the preservation of such memorials and repositories of history? For Merle, at least, having curated it for so long, she must in the end free herself of it. She literally clears it out, selling the contents of the room to finance her own retour de pay natal, her trip to Africa to see (she hopes) her daughter. As for the “timeless” people of Bournehills, there is no such shedding of the past. In fact, as Saul also realizes, the village and its “odd people” (the part of the “museum” that cannot be sold like in the old days of slavery) would remain “fixed and rooted in that other time, serving in this way as a lasting testimony to all that had gone on then.”Footnote ⁶² This double standard, as it were, raises a peculiarly Caribbean conundrum, the questions of who goes and who stays, who “escapes” and who remains imprisoned.

But although those who remain in Bournehills seem – to the unknowing viewer – to be asleep, they are, the novel finally suggests, “resisting” and defiant, “refusing to settle for anything less than what Cuffee had demanded in his time.”Footnote ⁶³ As the novel's penultimate paragraph makes even more explicit, the self-liberating moment represented by Pyre Hill is “smoldering still, the fire that Cuffee had started, which the legend would have it had burned for five years, refusing to die. It would flare again, full strength, one day.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In the novel's conclusion, then, Marshall collapses the gaps between past and present, “fact” and “fiction,” by positing a future “one day” that, in 1969, in the Caribbean, did not seem so far away: the hope for Caribbean unity, for “real” independence and the fulfillment of Cuffee Ned's demands through shared work and community was already flaring across the archipelago, evident in the black power movement and the surge of participatory governance that were presented as hallmarks of the “new democracies” of the region. “In our Caribbean societies,” wrote one participant in the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada – the birthplace of Fédon and of Marshall's novelFootnote ⁶⁵ – “the old spirit of communalism is not yet quite dead”:

Whether or not, in 1969, the people of the Caribbean will be able to nurture and sustain this spirit – under severe pressure from the globalizing socioeconomic forces of neocolonialism and nascent neoliberal policies – is the question Marshall poses in her historical novel, a question that generates as much tension as that produced by the operations of living history.

Kelly Baker Josephs rightly points out that among the most striking features of Erna Brodber's The Rainmaker's Mistake is its “seeming disregard for the conventional boundaries of, and between, time and space.” In the novel's representation of “a rapidly changing Caribbean present, existing simultaneously, chronologically and physically, with a developing past and a perplexing future,” “‘the free’ can be read as a place (not here), a time (not now), and a condition (not yet).”Footnote ⁶⁷ Liberated as Brodber's novel is from the “linear biases” of “progressive realism” that mark more traditional narrative forms, its engagements with apparently unfixed temporalities/spatialities is nevertheless grounded: in the soil itself. Whether events unfold on “Mr. Charlie's patent” – the thousand-acre sugar estate of the planter who “frees” the novel's multiple narrators and then disappears – or the provision grounds of Carabita Island – where Mr. Charlie's “children,” the hundred previously enslaved people who engage in agricultural practices that recall Cuffee Ned and the “true” independence of the Pyre Hill revolutionaries – the soil is absolutely foundational to The Rainmaker's Mistake.Footnote ⁶⁸

As mentioned in relation to Warner Arundell, Sylvia Wynter describes the significance of these two sites for Caribbean history and culture in her germinal article “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” While Wynter acknowledges the crucial distinctions between them – the plantation machine devoted to the production of monocrop exports and the “myth of history” and the small plots dedicated to food growing and folk culture – she also acknowledges that they are “twin children of the same parents”: “if the history of Caribbean society is that of a dual relation between plantation and plot, the two poles which originate in a single historical process, the ambivalence between the two has been and is the distinguishing characteristic of the Caribbean response.”Footnote ⁶⁹

As Elizabeth DeLoughrey points out, this ambivalence, “a vital (but overlooked) thread” of Wynter's essay, is also crucial to The Rainmaker's Mistake, most clearly generated by the origin story spun by Mr. Charlie and Woodville, according to which the workers are yams, plucked from the ground whenever Mr. Charlie needs more laborers on the estate. I would add further that the ambivalent response on the part of Caribbean readers – which Wynter argues is “the root cause of our alienation, and the possibility of our salvation” – grows out of the interconnected (agri)cultural labor performed on both sites: after all, the laborers who toiled in the cane fields were also those who cultivated food – “the yam, cassava, and sweet potato” – on the provision grounds that “provided the space for folk knowledge, orality, resistance to commodification, and African and indigenous continuities.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This historical “fact” is elided in Warner Arundell, dramatized throughout Chosen Place, Timeless People, and positioned at the forefront of The Rainmaker's Mistake.

In Brodber's novel the interconnectedness of plantation and plot is highlighted by repeated journeys through time and space between Mr. Charlie's patent and Carabita Island. In addition to the rich “dirt” taken from the plantation to build up the soil of Carabita (an ironic reversal of colonial practices involving the extraction of natural resources from colonized areas for the benefit of the colonizers), there are other bits and pieces of history that the Carabita community transports from their old “home” to their new, not least of which are the human remains excavated by the adult Queenie, the novel's most privileged narrator, who, in addition to traveling to “the Norm” to study medicine, has trained as an archaeologist.

Of all the acts of novelistic archaeology discussed in my essay, the unearthing of the remains of the three women (Phibbah, Princess, and Jubbah) subsequently identified as the mothers of the Carabita Islanders is the most “realistic.” With her future lover Essex – who has built an airplane using the island's bauxite deposits – Queenie travels back to the past/plantation on a forensic expedition. Convinced that this trip is as important to redressing the original crimes committed against the Carabita community as the earlier importation of soil is, Queenie undertakes to piece together their collective history, to dig through the layers and interpret her findings, armed with her “bag of archaeological tricks.” On the patent, Queenie identifies two earth mounds marked with sticks of wood etched with names (“Phibbah” and “Princess”) as graves.Footnote ⁷¹ There is also, they discover, a secret underground chamber that holds another key to their history:

The corpse, of course, is Mr. Charlie, which DeLoughrey describes as “the rotting god so vital to Benjamin's thesis of allegory and historical decay.”Footnote ⁷³ Certainly the archaeological discovery is evidence of the end of one age – Mr. Charlie's slaveholding days – and the beginning of another, “the free.”

The knowledge of his death that Queenie and Essex bring back to Carabita, along with the women's grave markers, provokes a process that proves as crucial and necessary as the excavations: They perform a (re)burial ceremony, memorializing the women they learn to call “mother,” acknowledging the archaeological evidence pointing to the likelihood that Woodville and Phibbah and Princess and Jubbah had populated Mr. Charlie's estate; that Woodville, not Mr. Charlie, is their “true” father. That, finally, they are a people who understand that “the yam story, like the Master himself – master, indeed! – was dwindling past myth,”Footnote ⁷⁴ of no use “in the free.”

In a recent, not unproblematic, overview of the historical novel from the nineteenth century to the postmodern period, Perry Anderson discusses some of the distinctions between works traditionally accepted as “true” historical novels – narratives “carried by a sense of progress,” that imagined the nation-state as its “ideal horizon” – and those produced in an explosion of literary endeavor over the last thirty to forty years, novels that are also historical, but whose narratives engage history in more ambivalent ways. He notes, too, that although the genre's (critical) reputation has declined from its peak in the early nineteenth century, its revival by contemporary authors constitutes a “resurrection” that “has also famously been a mutation,” the new forms of the historical novel signaling “the arrival of the postmodern.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Citing Frederick Jameson, Anderson provides a sense of what work these “new” historical novels perform: the function of their “exaggerated inventions of a fabulous and non-existent past (and future),” as Jameson declared, is to

As Anderson suggests, this is a powerful description in large part because it invites a scrutiny of the possessive pronoun invoked in Jameson's “our temporal historicity.”

Observing the wide-ranging incidence of historical novel writing that has contributed “to the new explosion of invented pasts,” the list (of predominantly male) writers that Anderson discusses “would stretch around the world; but “in point of origin,” Anderson declares,

Although I appreciate Anderson's appreciation of the centrality of the Atlantic world here, I do not think his subsuming of the Caribbean into Latin America acknowledges its criticality to the historical novel's “global diffusion” in either the classic or the revival period of the form – as I hope the three novels featured in this essay attest. Nor do I think that the overwhelming term “postmodernism” addresses the postcolonial elements that seem, to my mind, more definitive here than the postmodern. Caribbean postcolonial artists and activists (and their anticolonial forebears) who are actively reading and producing historical fiction are, to my mind, always cognizant that there would be no postmodernism without the precondition of colonialism's modernity, which, in turn, necessitated the anti- and postcolonial movements. That said, there are, of course, clear connections between these literary and aesthetic categories – including the imperatives about deconstructing categories and taxonomies.

But in terms of what I have tried to do in this essay, Anderson's essay sparks a useful reflection on the power of Caribbean historical novels at our own critical juncture in history. As I have argued throughout this essay, reading Joseph's, Marshall's, and Brodber's iterations of the historical novel means acknowledging that its cultural work can only be performed in conjunction with the reader who, in the process of reading, can acknowledge the productive tensions between “history” and “fact,” and recognize that those tensions inhere in the novels' representations of historical actors in and outside their pages. I hope that, in particular, my focus on the fictional–historical actors most explicitly engaged in would-be acts of self-emancipation – Fédon, Stinger/Cuffee Ned, Queenie – demonstrates not only that such characters are generated from the “actualities”/“realities” of the histories uncovered and retold, but also that the renarrated, reanimated histories themselves are predicated on what it means to be “in the free.” This state (past, present, and future) is only realizable if we, like the child Queenie carries, will “continue to search and to reproduce and to cultivate.”