This experimental novel includes aspects of both realism and antirealism, and it mixes several narrative strands using different strategies and varying the point of view from one section of the novel to another.

The novel opens with a kind of short prologue spoken by a first-person narrator. This narrator seems to speak as the voice of Africa, recollecting the struggles of the many Africans who have been spread throughout the colonial world—frequently against their will—in a vast diaspora. This narrator also returns at the end in a poetic coda.

In the introduction, a desperate African man tells of selling his three children into slavery. His crops had failed and he could not feed them, but he is distraught when they are gone: he calls the sale a desperate foolishness and blames himself for the fates that befall them. The three children are Nash, Martha, and Travis.

The bulk of the novel falls into the four parts, set at different times and in different places, that chronicle the lives of these dispersed Africans as they are assimilated into new cultures, along with selections from a slave-trader’s journal.

Caryl Phillips

Nash’s story is the focus of the first part, The Pagan Coast, and covers the period from 1834 to 1842. Nash has been a slave, and he calls his former master, Edward Williams, “father.” The term suggests a sacred and philosophical connection as well as a family tie. Nash is freed through the deeply religious motivations of his American owner, a man who has also educated his slaves. This man intends to found charitable Christian missions in Africa; Nash has traveled to Liberia to do missionary work—his father’s bidding—and to teach the less fortunate natives.

Through his letters, readers learn that although the master had inherited his estate, he did not believe in slavery. As he is able to, he educates and frees his slaves and sends some favored few back “home” to Africa.

Nash and Madison, another slave, compete for Edward Williams’s favor; they want to please their “father” and be selected to return to Africa and do his work. But Africa (specifically, Liberia) is a harsh land, and people in Nash’s settlement are dying; he loses the wife and child he brought from America.

As the situation becomes more desperate, Nash writes letters to his former master pleading for financial support for the mission and the school. He doesn’t hear back, however: Edward Williams’s jealous wife is intervening, withholding the letters from him so he will not spend his fortune on this missionary scheme. Nash’s letters to Mr. Williams have a prayer-life quality, and his relation to his former master is that of a supplicant to a god; as time goes on, he retreats into greater primitivism.

Nash takes on three wives and has many children, and he keeps relocating his settlement farther and farther back up the river. He finally writes to Edward Williams not to come, but he never sends the letter. Edward Williams comes to Liberia, as he had always planned to do, with Madison. His goal is to check on the miracles he expects Nash to have worked there; instead, he discovers that Nash has died in the last outpost farthest up the river. When Madison sees the impoverished and primitive conditions Nash had lived in, he loses respect for Edward Williams for allowing this situation to develop and abandons him in the wilderness.

The second part, called West, is about Martha; in it, the American West serves as a metaphor for opportunity and fulfillment. The story is revealed from Martha’s later life through flashbacks to her youth caused by catalysts that make her think of her lost daughter, Eliza Mae. Both her husband and daughter had been sold away from her, and she too is sold to a Christian family that relocates to Kansas to homestead. There, they cannot make a success of their farm, and so they plan to sell Martha back into slavery; to save herself, she walks away from her owners, and the Emancipation Proclamation frees her before she can be found.

She travels to Dodge, farther west, eventually becoming a laundress with her friend Lucy; she has a long-term relationship with a man, Chester, during this period. After Chester is killed in a gambling dispute, Martha and Lucy go to Fort Leavenworth to wash and clean for the “colored troops” stationed there. When Lucy finds a husband who takes her away to San Francisco, Martha, now much older and in ill health, decides she must go still farther west. She attaches herself to a Black man who is going west, offering to earn her passage by washing and cooking. Early in the journey, however, she is too sick to go on, and she is left in Denver, a frontier town, where a woman finds her and gives her shelter, nursing her through a terminal illness until she dies alone, lost in her memories of her daughter. The woman who has saved her does not even know Martha’s name and has to choose one to put on the old woman’s headstone.

The third part is called Crossing the River and contains the journal of the young captain of a slave ship, along with some letters to his wife. The journal entries are factual rather than ruminative, reporting the weather, purchases of slaves, and events on board. In contrast, his letters to his wife reveal the personality of a loving husband and a sensitive man who finds himself immersed in a hellish world that he is helping to create even as he suffers its effects. The slave trade is merely a business, although a particularly odious one—the captain gets his living and supports his family by this means, but he is no monster. In spite of his misgivings, he facilitates the continuance of this monstrosity.

In the fourth part, called Somewhere in England, the narrative breaks into two parts that are separated by 20 years. Joyce, a white Englishwoman, tells the story in a first-person narrative that covers the period 1935–45. Her mother is a straitlaced Christian who drives her daughter away from the church; Joyce meets Len, who suffers from black lung, and who therefore cannot fight in the war. Len has little exposure to religion and is a somewhat disreputable figure; nonetheless, he and Joyce marry.

Joyce’s lot is bitter: Len drinks and beats her and eventually goes to jail for black-market dealings with ration cards. Joyce acquires a bit of freedom with Len’s incarceration; eventually, she meets Travis when a unit of Black American soldiers is billeted in her village in 1942. Eventually, she and Travis marry, over many objections, and on the conditions that this mixed-race marriage is not brought to the United States. Joyce bears a son, Greer, but Travis is killed in battle. When Len, her divorced husband, turns her out of the business that has sustained her, in desperation Joyce gives her new son up for adoption if anyone will have him.

In 1963, the lost son knocks on Joyce’s door. She has remarried and has other children now, and she is simultaneously drawn to him and hurt by his presence. She had destroyed every picture and memento of her love for Travis and the existence of this son. She is not prepared to make a place in her heart for him again.

Through the introductory narrator of this novel, Caryl Phillips seems to suggest that Africa as a whole must shoulder some of the burden of responsibility for the sufferings that Africans have endured in the Western strongholds of colonialism. But the existence of slavery among supposedly Christian people is on the conscience of those who maintained this heinous system, as is the racism that continued to mar the lives of Africa’s descendants long after slavery was abolished.

Bibliography

Coetzee, J. M. Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999. New York: Viking, 2001.

Julien, Claude. “Surviving Through a Pattern of Timeless Moments: A Reading of Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River.” In Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. Edited by Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, and Carl Pederson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 86–95.

Law, Gail. “ ‘A Chorus of Common Memory’: Slavery and Redemption in Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge and Crossing the River.” Research in African Literatures 29, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 122–141.

Categories: British Literature, Diaspora Criticism, Experimental Novels, Literature, Novel Analysis

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