"A High Wind in Jamaica"

[fiefoe]

This book has some pedigreed endorsements. First the Provincial Lady mentioned that it was all the rage, then Zadie Smith put in some good words for it somewhere as well. I'm glad to recognize Henry Darger's work on the NY Review Classics edition cover. His strange, colorful art, with its emphasis on Innocence threatened and threatening, is an excellent match for Richard Hughes's sunlit goth.

• Presently one of the heiresses persuaded her tyrants to lend her an old print dress, and came and pottered about in the mess halfheartedly: tried to wipe the old blood and feathers of slaughtered chickens from a gilt and marble table: tried to talk sensibly: tried to wind an ormolu clock: and then gave it up and mooned away back to bed.
  
• What they skim off oozes across the floor with an admixture of a good deal of filth - insects, even rats, and whatever sticks to negroes' feet - into another basin, thence to be distilled into rum.
  
• He used to sit all day on the stone barbecues..., digging maggots out of his toes. This seemed at first very horrid to the children, but he seemed quite contented; and when jiggers got under their own skins, and laid their little bags of eggs there, it was not absolutely unpleasant.
  

As for the matter of education:

• The Misses Parker, grew old; and were by education incapable.
• It was a kind of paradise for English children to come to, especially at that time, when no one lived in at all a wild way at home. ... (The girls) even had two pockets in their frocks.
• (The negroes) were, of course, Christians, so there was nothing to be done about their morals.
• Her room was full of these and other pets, some alive, some probably dead.
  
• They had a governess whose blood was possibly not pure.
  
• It just showed what sort of people Creoles were, to talk about Smell, in that open way.