In Jamaican culture, a duppy is the vengeful spirit of a person who has died harboring a grievance. Those whom the duppy blames will be haunted with unremitting wrath. “It’s not the soul” that makes the duppy, an elderly woman informed the anthropologist Martha Beckwith in the 1920s, “for the soul goes to heaven, and it’s not the body, for we know that goes away into the earth, but it’s the shadow.” It’s still the custom in some parts of Jamaica for friends and relations of the troubled deceased to nail down the sleeves and socks of the corpse in its coffin to ensure that the duppy cannot escape. But what if the duppy is already at large?
The Jamaican novelist Diana McCaulay’s A House for Miss Pauline is a supernatural story about the consequences of what is assumed to be a murder. The corpse of the victim, Turner Buchanan, a foreigner, has never been found, and Buchanan’s shadow is just one of several candidates for the duppy, if that’s what it is, that wails through the stone walls of the house of an elderly country woman, Miss Pauline. As she nears her hundredth birthday, she is close to death and increasingly taking stock of her life. Miss Pauline has regrets, but she has never doubted her virtues and accomplishments, including the stone house she built and has been living in since the 1950s—a house resistant to hurricanes and other natural disasters.
Early on in A House for Miss Pauline, we learn that Pauline Evadne Sinclair, born on December 29, 1918, in the village of Mason Hall, lives alone and has been recently plagued by bouts of fitful sleep. She hardly dares to admit to herself, never mind to anyone else, that every night for a week the stone walls of her home have begun to move—each “shivers like a living thing.” The cause might be an aftershock from an earthquake, but Miss Pauline is not aware of reports of one on the island. One night she stands and berates the wall, and to a degree herself, about the illogicality of her fear: “Stone is not dawg or man. Stone cyah move.”
An impartial observer might conclude that the ninety-nine-year-old could be suffering from delusion or at least confusion as a result of infirmity and old age. Well, that might be true for a lesser individual, but certainly not for the formidable Miss Pauline. When kind people in the village flatter her, saying, “Miss Pauline? How you so strong? You go live forever, nuh true?,” the old woman barks back, “Don’t chat fuckery inna ma ears…. Nobaddy live forever. Nobaddy want live forever.”
Miss Pauline has never previously been troubled by insomnia, not even when, decades before, she suffered from “the recurring nightmare of an underground cavern below an unreachable hole in the rock, arousing guilt that clung like mortar.” But does that frequent nightmare hold some clue for what’s unsettling her now? Perhaps. For this is a novel of secrets and lies, coupled with the foreshadowing of a death foretold—Miss Pauline’s—since she knows from the outset that even though it’s just over a month away, she won’t live to celebrate her century. Judgment is coming and the moving stones are a sign: “She believes buildings hold the stories of those who lived and died within their walls and keep their secrets. Her secret. She’s afraid because the stones know what she did all those years ago.”
McCaulay is in no rush to reveal Miss Pauline’s secret. She shrewdly withholds facts, but even when they are partially revealed, they are slippery, since Miss Pauline also adheres to two Jamaican maxims: There are no facts, only versions and Me nuh like people chat me business. The combination means that contested facts, especially within her family, are rarely discussed in public. Hints to throw people off from the truth are preferable.
There’s a fierceness about Miss Pauline that would give anyone pause before challenging her. Her back may be failing, her knees forever creaking, and her joints refusing to bend, but she still walks unbowed and unaided everywhere in the village and in the verdant bush, armed with a machete to clear paths as she goes. This is a woman who is never far from her trusty cutlass, hidden under her skirts or under her bed, and she is ready to use it to chop back vegetation or chop “bad-minded” people who may steal into her home at night to rob or harm her. She is forever on high alert.
The book sweeps back and forth through the decades, covering Miss Pauline’s precocious teenage years, motherhood, grandmotherhood, widowhood, and present life—the period that is described in the most detail. All of her peers are dead. She is the last of a generation marked by the aftermath of the island’s violent history, especially slavery and British colonial rule. Miss Pauline is the unforgiving keeper of the many stories of transgressions against her kith and kin, a kind of Caribbean cousin to the 110-year-old storyteller created by Ernest J. Gaines in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), a novel that portrayed African American history from the Civil War to the civil rights era.
In McCaulay’s literary conceit, Miss Pauline is presented as a participating observer in her own life. There’s a striking linguistic tension between the narrator and the protagonist—between Pauline’s inner life, expressed by the narrator in standard English (“She’s amused by her annoyance”), and her vivid patois, which emerges as if in dialogue with someone who should understand her penchant for obfuscation (“Some tings not good to talk”).
The initial drama of McCaulay’s novel is propelled by the kind of incident that Jamaican mothers feel compelled to prepare their soon-to-be menstruating daughters for: the unwanted and inappropriate attention of lascivious men, especially to girls such as Pauline who appear to be “force-ripe”—more mature than their years would suggest. Pauline’s mother warns her to beware because “when you start bleed, you will breed.”
Neither mother nor daughter, though, expects that the first test will come at school. On the day that Pauline’s monthly periods start, Pastor Edmond Slowly, Mason Hall’s only teacher, concocts a reason to give the thirteen-year-old a detention. Alone in the classroom, he runs his hands over her shoulders and then her breasts. With the pastor’s intentions made clear, McCaulay shows adeptly how Pauline moves from guileless reverence for him to fulminating disgust, in a series of escalating verbal exchanges that chart the swift shift in dynamic between teacher and pupil. Pastor Slowly is a cynic whose crude, thinly veiled innuendo—“You are a vessel of god and I am his messenger”—is delivered without irony. But the force of Pauline’s rejection—spitting in his face—shuts down the next step in his sexual advances, even though the teacher is physically more powerful than his pupil.
Though Pauline doesn’t realize it at the time, fighting off the pastor, fleeing the classroom and school, and taking herself off to the bush is the most consequential act of her young life. She gets lost in the forest, a terrifying place known for its ancient spirits and cotton trees, said to be “fulla duppy,” from which backra (white enslavers) were known to have hanged recalcitrant enslaved people. But there Pauline stumbles across the ruins of a backra’s manor, Mason Hall:
It was unimaginable as a home; a miraculous construction of uneven stones, fit together seamlessly where they could be seen, but most were covered in greenery. Absent windows like blindness. Tree roots snaking through the walls, as if trying to pull the building apart. Festoons of vines. No veranda at the front; the roof fallen in. A large doorway with a single plank of wood hanging half off a hinge. Two wide stone steps leading to the door. Darkness inside.
In the forest Pauline follows a pledge she has made to herself: never to feel fear. Over the years she returns to the ruins of the backra’s house with books in hand, and incrementally the space becomes a “sanctuary of her youth.” Pauline never goes back to school. She schools herself in her own secret seminary in the forest, fashioned from the remains of a room on the ground floor of the manor:
She brought a pile of crocus bags with her, taking care to shake them out each time she visited to dislodge scorpions and centipedes, and for her remaining teenage years, she lay with her books…building word upon word, idea upon idea. She dreamed. She…learned to masturbate in that room, and it made her laugh out loud. Backra house. Fuck him. She made it hers.
A House for Miss Pauline, which has all the pleasure and rewards of a fine novel, is also a passionate social history. It exudes a raw authenticity and captures the musicality of “nation language,” of place and people; the book beats to the rhythm of Jamaica, which is entirely in keeping with its beguiling and vexing environment. It’s as if the novelist has been guided by the poet Kamau Brathwaite’s famous assertion: “The hurricane does not roar in pentameter.” Miss Pauline, like Jamaica and ultimately A House for Miss Pauline itself, is a brutal beauty forged in decades of adversity. When she proclaims that “woman rain never done,” she evokes the never-ending burden shouldered by her sisters in Jamaica, living with the uncertainty of manmade and natural disasters.
The spectacular challenge of the merciless hurricane season is recalled through the devastation of Hurricane Charlie, which bludgeoned Jamaica in 1951, destroying homes and livelihoods and killing many. In its aftermath, Pauline became convinced that the only way to withstand a future threat from a tropical cyclone was to build a house out of limestone taken from the backra’s manor and to encourage her neighbors to follow suit.
The question of land and legacy is central to the novel. Why shouldn’t the descendants of the enslaved profit from land cultivated by their ancestors by repurposing plantations abandoned after emancipation more than a century ago by absentee landlords? Only years later will the inhabitants of Mason Hall be forced to reflect on the unexpected consequences of that seemingly reasonable decision.
Miss Pauline also tries her hand at growing ganja to improve her family’s life. The drug was criminalized on the island in 1913, but Jamaicans continued to use it: socially, mixing it into cakes and “bush” teas; medicinally for myriad ailments; and sacramentally in Rastafari, as a kind of instrument of communication with Jah. Miss Pauline is not a consumer. She deals in ganja for a practical reason: survival.
The ganja trade, though, comes with considerable risks, from both rivals and the authorities, who regularly send armed troops to clamp down on this shadow economy. Soldiers had even shot and killed her friend and neighbor who grew ganja. But Miss Pauline is always battle-ready for intervention from any armed forces, telling herself, “Fuck rule an law. Starvin kill you faster than solja.” The same defiance shapes her attitude toward the ruins of the backra’s house: “Me tek the slavery stone to build ma house.” At the very least, appropriating the limestone is a small act of reparation from “the what-lef of those who took everything from her ancestors.”
The arrival, though, of Turner Buchanan is proof—how could Pauline forget—that “woman rain never done.” He shows up in the village many years after she has constructed her stone house, announcing that he has the legal paperwork proving he has inherited much, if not all, of Mason Hall, including the land on which Pauline lives. “She wanted to rage at the whiteman, just the latest in a long line of oppressors”: he is an alien whose attachment to the land is transactional, focused on financial reward, and for Miss Pauline he represents all white people, no matter how long their association with Jamaica, who have had a head start in life, through the privileges of color, class, and inherited wealth. Buchanan cannot comprehend that Miss Pauline’s house of stone is her attempt to rewrite history. In tearing down the old house, she asserts, “we remake it for we.”
Buchanan and his adult son, Jeffrey—who decades after his father’s disappearance travels to Jamaica to claim his imagined thousand-acre inheritance—are arrogant and patronizing men who lack any redeeming qualities; they function largely as ciphers to illuminate Pauline’s complexity. If the few white figures in the novel lack depth, that’s primarily a reflection of their characters; they are immersed in their own solipsism.
The novel has a quiet, sustained intensity that matches Miss Pauline’s temperament. The old woman is sometimes fractious, but her indomitable spirit pushes her to heights and experiences much younger people would shy away from. The writing is subtle and detailed, darkly humorous, and at times eerie and sinister.
Jeffrey’s disregard of the ninety-nine-year-old Miss Pauline is as disturbing to read as it is believable. He’s like a “bulldozer revving its engine, poised to flatten the side of a mountain,” concludes the narrator, and is incapable of empathy toward a woman he sees as “Black, female, old, rural, foreign, poor, powerless, friendless, uneducated.” Unsurprisingly, it’s only when Jeffrey kisses his teeth, in an expression of scorn and skepticism, that Miss Pauline “sees the ghost of a Jamaican heritage.” Even so, she struggles to accept that Jeffrey may be her cousin (albeit several times removed) and that if she looks closely she’ll discover the kind of man disparaged in Jamaica as passing for white—who is, in local parlance, touched by the tarbrush.
The entanglement of the so-called races is a central part of McCaulay’s own story as well. In an essay about A House for Miss Pauline, part of which appears as an afterword, she sheds light on its fascinating origins. During an episode of the ancestral investigation TV show DNA Detectives, she learned that she was descended on her mother’s side from “a Portuguese Sephardic Jew named Hananel d’Aguilar, and an enslaved ‘mustee’ woman, Nancy McLean, who lived and labored on a plantation” in Mason Hall, which is why she kept the name for her fictional village. Uncomfortable as a “light-skinned Jamaican,” McCaulay was relieved by the revelation: “Surely Black ancestry, however watered down over the decades, confirmed the Jamaican roots I felt so strongly.” But then she made the deeply disturbing discovery through the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project at University College London that the son of Hananel d’Aguilar and Nancy McLean—who had been born in slavery—had obtained £927 (about $132,000 in today’s money) in compensation from Britain after the emancipation of the forty-five people he had owned.
It sounds counterintuitive, but such cases of black-on-black enslavement, though small in number, were not exceptional. And after abolition, all those who had made a living from British slave plantations were entitled to apply for compensation for loss of earnings from a £20 million UK government fund. Among the claimants were the illegitimate offspring of miscegenation between white planters and enslaved women. Forty percent of the claimants were women, according to the Jamaican-born cultural historian Stuart Hall in his posthumously published memoir Familiar Stranger (2017). The majority of them were of mixed descent and continued to serve as willing “conscripts to the colonial order.” Unfortunately there’s no room in McCaulay’s novel for an interrogation of the conflicts felt by such women; instead we’re left with the eerie sound emerging from the stone walls. The suspicion that this might be a female duppy is strengthened by the fact that McCaulay bases the fictionalized enslavers who resided in the great house at Mason Hall on her recently discovered ancestors.
It has long been a source of outrage in the former British colonies of the Caribbean that the British government generously compensated the enslavers after emancipation and not the enslaved. Worse still, the British extended the enactment of abolition with a transitional “apprenticeship” period for the formerly enslaved to adjust to the idea of freedom; plantation work remained compulsory for them, but they were not fully paid. Almost two centuries later, Jamaicans are still angered by that injustice, and this in part explains why Jamaica, and particularly the capital, Kingston, is portrayed as having an “atmosphere of suppressed rage” in A House for Miss Pauline.
McCaulay is careful to contrast Jamaican violence with Jamaican kindness. This is most evident in the relationships that Miss Pauline develops with several young men, proxy grandsons or even great-grandsons. Youths such as Lamont—“wearing oversized pants around his hips, an outline of a handgun is etched into his hair”—may appear to inspire fear, but the old woman treats them as favored and loved blood relations, and each of them responds in kind. There are glimpses of unexpected tenderness—such as the moment when Lamont shifts up on his motorcycle while Miss Pauline climbs on behind him and “puts her arms around his waist, feels his springy, young man muscles, suppresses the urge to lay her cheek between his shoulder blades.” These characterizations offer a corrective to the stereotype of the rudeboy rebel violence of Jamaican men.
The book, though, doesn’t shy away from or deny the reality of bloodshed. There are uncomfortable revelations about how good people may succumb to violence or accept it unquestioningly as a historical consequence of slavery. The heightened aggression of daily life in the book is contrasted with the great charm of Mason Hall, a place of danger perhaps, but also of healing.
The stones of Miss Pauline’s house that have begun to shiver and move are an outward manifestation of her inner turmoil. What’s really troubling her is her conscience and her urgent need to at least reconcile herself to a past wrong before she dies. A House for Miss Pauline is a quietly angry novel about atonement, justice, and equal rights. But history is complicated, and victims and perpetrators are entangled. The narrator believes that “if she was clear in her own mind what would be a just outcome, that would be enough.” But even after ninety-nine years of life, clarity has proved to be elusive.
Activities suggesting the continued displeasure of a duppy are laced through the book. Suspicion about its identity moves from Turner Buchanan’s shadow to the stronger likelihood of it being Nancy. But toward the end of the book, it is possible to imagine that before her hundredth birthday, Miss Pauline’s shadow will transition to a duppy as well, an unsettled spirit roaming the island. Whether you believe in duppies or not, you wouldn’t want to get on her shadow side.
English (US) · 