Free No Safeguards by H. Nigel Thomas Page B

the books written by Trinidad’s Prime Minister Eric Williams and the works of the earlier West Indian novelists: Lamming, Anthony, Selvon, Mais, Naipaul. Her favourite Caribbean novelist was Earl Lovelace; she loved the poems of Lorna Goodison; and she ordered many of the books of authors mentioned on BBC, especially books of poetry by poets whose works she’d heard and loved. She’d have me read their poems aloud to her: Blake’s, Yeats’, Auden’s — I remember. Paul would pause from his own reading to listen. She had read “London” and “Sailing to Byzantium” so many times, she knew them by heart, and she would break into laughter, sometimes to the point of tears, over Auden’s “As I Walked out One Evening.” I remember her saying: “What a happy childhood that Mr. Yeats had. I hope it wasn’t paid for with pillage.” Three days before Paul and I left for Canada she received a copy of Brave New World . She’d ordered it after listening to a BBC programme on Aldous Huxley. At one point during the programme, she’d grown wistful, then sighed and said aloud: “Who knows what my life would have been if I had emigrated?” I wish she were alive today so I could ask her what she meant, just to hear her say it. The answers are plentiful in her journals. Grama, we cannot conquer fate .
    When my voice changed at 13, she gave me a book that explained puberty, and read it along with me, pausing every so often to emphasize the consequences of careless sex. And I could never forget the discussion we had about Wide Sargasso Sea , which was on my CXC syllabus. She told me it was full of historical inaccuracies, that the sort of liberty the Black servants are shown to enjoy a few years after the abolition of slavery, was nonsense, that Rhys was flattering the white readers she knew would be buying her books. But she warned me not to raise the issue in class, for my literature teacher was the great-grandson of a plantocrat who’d resisted all British attempts to introduce universal elementary education to St. Vincent, “and even today they still own most of the wealth in St. Vincent.” I didn’t think the teacher would have minded, but I followed her advice. In the end I chose to write my essay on the villains and heroes in Wide Sargasso Sea , and she suggested I should compare Rhys’ villains with Shakespeare’s. What a woman! I know now that Paul and I were lucky and privileged to have her as grandmother and guardian. No wonder Paul worships her. Few Vincentians read beyond the textbooks they’re forced to study. If you want to hide something from Black people, put it in a book. I’m sure some racist came up with that but it’s only Black people who repeat it. Above all else she gave me a love for learning that Anna couldn’t have given me, especially if she had remained with Caleb. Yes, I think I can forgive her for her partiality to Paul.
    Before Anna left Caleb, while we lived in Georgetown, I played with Percy and Samuel, and on occasion with Frederick and a handful of schoolmates in the schoolyard. I was afraid to disobey Caleb and play with the other children on non-school days because the second time I’d done so Caleb found out and flogged me. We weren’t to “mingle with the damned.” The apostle Paul had advised the redeemed to shun the company of the unredeemed for they were “leagued with the devil and the Antichrist” and would “put snares in our paths.” And God himself had decided before he created the world that these people should go to hell. For the same reason Caleb didn’t want us to visit Grama often. I couldn’t believe that Grama worshipped the devil nor could I understand why, thousands of years before Grama was born, God had decided to send her to hell. Once I heard Caleb and Brother Simmons quarrelling about this in the living room — Brother