Red Jacket

She off-loads her cargo of grief, the burden of a self that she now judges to be ruined at the root: Grace the dump pikni; the red jacket in a black family; the child too terrified to open her mouth; the sibling with a sister who disclaimed her; the misfit at St. Chad's.

The beginning of Red Jacket was certainly intriguing: We meet Grace Carpenter, a little girl living on the fictional Caribbean island of St. Chris who has a close relationship with her large family and especially with her Gramps; a man whose voice has a “deep, sweet sound” from “long life, white rum, and years of singing in the gospel choir”; with wisdom, education, and a morality built from grappling with his God, Gramps is probably my favourite character of all. Grace herself feels like an outcast – she's the best student in a family that values academics, but as her freckled bronze skin and smooth red hair make her stand out from everyone else's dark colouring, she must endure the whispers of unkind neighbours; those who would infer that Grace is “ 'a jacket', unsanctified fruit of a union between Pa and some red woman.” Interspersed with chapters detailing Grace's developing years are letters from a woman in NYC who, along with Gramps, keep the secret of Grace's true origins. As I said, this beginning bit is very interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed the way that author Pamela Mordecai was able to evoke life in various settings around St. Chris.

When Grace moves to Toronto for university, however, this book starts to become something else – after years of being discriminated against for being too light, Grace is suddenly too dark among her fellow students at the U of T and she must endure discrimination, dismissal, and constant rudeness from staff and students alike. I don't know if this was based on Mordecai's experience after emigrating from Jamaica, but it felt tedious and overblown. For example: when Grace writes a respectful letter to the editor describing the death of a little boy from starvation and wondering if he fell through the cracks because he was black, the immediate blowback was other letters saying, “If you don't like Canada you ungrateful immigrant, there's the door”. But reading and rereading the original letter, I can't see anything that would have identified “Grace Carpenter” as an immigrant, so the whole setup fell apart for me; and if I can't believe the big things, I won't believe the small. In Toronto, Grace finds and joins a wonderful church, but then stops going for no reason. She initially spurns her roommate's attempts at friendship. She finds out who her birth mother is but doesn't want a relationship. Every bad thing that happens to her, Grace blames on wiley Papa God. And I'm supposed to have empathy for her disconnectedness?

In between chapters about Grace, we also have some from the point-of-view of Jimmy (a Jesuit who has visions of the future) and Mark (Chancellor of a Caribbean bank, some kind of NGO). As Mark's sections happen in the future, we get a glimpse of what kind of work Grace is educating herself for and the timeline jumps around until all three of these characters meet up in the end. I don't tend to be confused by time jumping, but when you throw in someone with premonitions, the whole thing can get messy. The first time Jimmy had a seizure, I had no idea that his vision was meant to be a premonition, and when the manner of his wife's death wasn't revealed for hundreds of pages, I had no idea that that was supposed to have been a premonition of her death. As the Mark character didn't really matter in the big picture, and as his story wasn't fascinating in the details, I don't know why his sections are even in the book. 

Mordecai is primarily known as a poet (Red Jacket is her first novel), and while there was some lovely writing, there were many passages that I simply found confusing:

Gatekeepers. Their visitor misunderstood about the gatekeepers and the palm greasing. G words – gatekeepers, grease. Is it narrow, western, stupid? Why is the greed always in African governments, never in the European lust for gold, oil, diamonds? Why is it never in the foreign letch for immoral local partners in depredation? Perish the thought! That's good business, not greed.

Note the exclamation mark there! I don't know if I've ever read a book that contained more exclamations! Often, dialogue read like a police interview transcript. Events happen late in the book that don't seem to have had any foundation laid for them, and while the ending has some very interesting writing, I found it unsatisfying. I appreciate Mordecai's efforts to describe both the Caribbean and African settings in detail, but too often details felt crammed in and not organic to the story flow:

The sun, set upon by feisty grey clouds, isn't giving in. It elbows its way to a thin splinter in the murk, breaking through in an apostrophe of pure light that falls on his father's most recent undertaking, a grove of red sorrel. Funny, he thinks of it by its St. Chris name, sorrel, rather than bissap, the name they give it in West Africa. Bissape is a popular drink in Mabuli. Sappi is a beer brewed from the flowers of the plant.

And I found it strange to cram in all these facts about two fictional locations – I may have appreciated Red Jacket more if St. Chris and Mabuli actually existed. I feel bad that I didn't much enjoy this book, especially after thinking that the opening was so charming. It's not a total waste of time, but Red Jacket wouldn't get a very high recommendation from me.

The 2015 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize nominees:

André Alexis - Fifteen Dogs

Elizabeth Hay - His Whole Life

Pamela Mordecai - Red Jacket 

Russell Smith - Confidence
John Vaillant - The Jaguar's Children

*Won by André Alexis, a good result in my opinion

*****

There's a throwaway line in Red Jacket that grabbed my attention:

There's a children's storybook called Waiting for the Thursday Boat in which God is a little black girl. I daresay he could manage to be a trickster spider as well.

Naturally curious, I looked into the storybook, and when I discovered that it was an old title by local, beloved author Robert Munsch, I thought, “Oooh, I need to read that.” But...this book, released in 1989, had caused some degree of controversy – including being banned (or maybe just restricted) by a nearby school board – and as a result, was out of print and not available to borrow from the library or to buy from a store. Robert Munsch! Banned and restricted! How can I get my hands on this dangerous and subversive title?! Rolling up my sleeves and prepared to scour the dark recesses of the internet, I found it, used, right away on amazon.com – for a penny plus shipping – and sat back and waited for it to arrive at my door. And...it's pretty okay. Since it's not readily available, here's the story:

McKeon is the last giant in Ireland – the rest having been tossed out by St Patrick when he was clearing the land of snakes and elves – and when McKeon decides to complain about these actions directly to the saint himself, Patrick declares that he was only doing what God wanted.

Then send out your God.
I'll kick Him in the knee.
I'll knock Him on the head.
He'll never recover.

When St Patrick laughs at this threat, McKeon goes on a rampage, tossing all the church bells in Ireland into the ocean. Finally, St Patrick warns the giant that he's made God mad and, “God is coming on the Thursday boat.” McKeon is pleased and plans to pound God into applesauce. When God does arrive in the form of a little black girl, McKeon doesn't recognise Her as God, and even when the giant and the little girl later jump right up to heaven, McKeon mistakenly thinks that God must live in the biggest house and is confused when He can't be found. Finally, the little girl declares, “Saints are for hanging up church bells and giants are for tearing them down. That's just the way it is. Why don't you two try getting along?” The book ends:

Then she started to laugh. She laughed til the mountains shook, rivers moved and stars changed directions. For a little girl she had an enormous laugh.

McKeon is still throwing church bells out of heaven.
They become shooting stars.
Go out some night and look for one.

This book follows the familiar Munsch themes of accepting differences and learning to get along, and it certainly suits Munsch's outrageous streak (imagine threatening to kick God in the knee or to pound Him into applesauce?), but I have to wonder who it was written for. A religious family might find aspects blasphemous, and nonreligious (or at any rate, non-Christian) parents might feel uncomfortable reading to their children about God and St Patrick in heaven. By having the story feature a giant who throws down church bells that we mistake for shooting stars, I suppose we cross the line into pagan myth. Is Waiting for the Thursday Boat, then, for secular agnostics who can accept all of the above as mere mythology, as suitable for picture books as tales of Zeus and Odin? I wasn't personally offended – why not have God portrayed as a nonviolent little black girl? – but because it's a story about God, I couldn't stop wondering what other people think about it. In and of itself, Waiting for the Thursday Boat has beautiful illustrations, some provocative ideas, but it doesn't have the urgent energy of Munsch's funniest books (Good Families Don't or Mortimer) or the poignancy of his most thoughtful (Love You Forever or The Paper Bag Princess). This is a middle of the road book, and as I can't find evidence of a widespread controversy after its release, I'm going to assume that it was lack of interest – lack of an audience? – that caused Waiting for the Thursday Boat to go out of print.