C. L. R. James: A Life - Farrukh Dhondy - Hardcover - 1 AMER ED

Chapter 1 England Expects My chief memory is of my mother sitting reading and I lying on the floor near her reading until it was time to go to bed9 o'clock. She was a very tall woman, my colour, with a superb carriage and so handsome that everybody always asked who she was. She dressed in the latest fashionshe had a passion for dress and was herself a finished seamstress. But she was a reader. She read everything that came her way. I can see her now, sitting very straight with the book held high, her pince-nez on her Caucasian nose, reading till long after midnight. This is probably C.L.R. James's earliest recorded memory. In fact, all we have of his childhood is what he tells us, for there are no witnesses to his birth and early childhood; C.L.R. outlived them all. Cyril Lionel Robert James was born on 4 January 1901 in Tunapuna, Trinidad. His father, Robert, was a schoolteacher, the son of a sugar estate worker and his mother, Bessie, was one of three sisters, daughters of Joshua Rudder, a railroad fireman, originally from Barbados. Josh, as he was known, worked the single line from Port of Spain in the north to San Fernando in the south. The railroad carried wagon after wagon of sugarcane produce, the raw cane one way, the partially refined sugar the other. Josh worked the line in more ways than one, having relationships with various women who lived on the railroad route. Bessie's mother was one of them, bearing not only Bessie, but two other girls, Florence and Lottie, before dying giving birth to Josh's next child. In late nineteenth-century Trinidad, fifty years after slavery was abolished, Josh knew that the girls would have been miserably treated by a stepmother. Instead, he sent the three girls to a Wesleyan convent, a school in the south of Trinidad where orphans or girls without mothers went. He entrusted them to the care of the nuns who would give them an education as well as turn them into eligible young ladies. Having left his daughters in safe hands, Joshua proceeded to make more than twenty-five other children up and down the railroad. Bessie met Robert, C.L.R.'s father, at a function held by the church in the Trinidadian deep south, at a place called New Grant. James Sen. was the head of the school there, and responsible for a hundred or more rural children. He was there as part of a system by which novice schoolmasters in the employ of the Government had to do their stint in a country school before they could apply for a transfer to a city school. Robert James met Bessie in the institution of the church and married her in it. The church dominated the lives of the emergent black professional class at the turn of the nineteenth century. Robert proposed formally to Bessie and their union was solemnized by the church. This was the procedure that Robert's employers, white British colonial administrators, would have approved. It wasn't the way his father-in-law Josh had chosen. Robert and Bessie soon had two boys and then a girl: Eric, Cyril Lionel Robert and Olive. New Grant was a place of sugaracres and acres of cane with straight roads and smaller paths winding in and out of the plantations. The population was mainly Indian, people on 'sub-indentures', which were contracts made in India with the labourers who had volunteered or been pressed into coming to the West Indies for a fixed term. Most of these indentured labourers had served their terms and decided to remain in Trinidad. They had, however, brought something of India with them. There was a temple and a mosque in the New Grant area. Christian converts went to church. The James family was clearly differentiated from the cane cutters with whose children C.L.R. went to school. The cane cutters lived clustered around the farmlands, in clumps of houses near the road, along which bullock-drawn carts pulled loads of cut cane. The teacher's house, like thDhondy, Farrukh is the author of 'C. L. R. James: A Life - Farrukh Dhondy - Hardcover - 1 AMER ED' with ISBN 9780375421006 and ISBN 0375421009.