EDITORS' CHOICE

Pamela Mordecai. Pink Icing and Other Stories. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2006.

"It is not so simple, not so simple at all."

The final sentence of the last of the twelve stories in Pamela Mordecai's collection sums up most of them, for they beguile with a surface simplicity while being anything but simple. The majority are told from a child's perspective, a fitting viewpoint, given the author's back-ground in juvenile fiction. (Five of her books are for children.) Complexity is frequently a product of the tension between what the reader understands and the young narrators do not. Mordecai makes the most of this tension, using it to create stories that are as unsettling as they are insightful about the nexus of the child's world and the adult's.

On the surface, the title story, "Pink Icing," is about an eight-year-old girl walking from school to a shop to buy a slice of cake with pink icing. It ends calmly, with the narrator taking the first bite of the icing. But during the walk important, often hazardous things happen. There is the traffic on the road, the gangs of boys who call the school girls "nasty names" and delight in bouncing their bags into the gutter; and a huge lizard on the road runs over the narrator's foot, causing her to drop her books, which are promptly run over by a car. She falls onto the sidewalk and two big boys in the car lean out of the windows and laugh.

Jamaica, where all the stories are set, is a land with racial and class divisions, and evidence of these divisions surface repeatedly—throughout the book and the story. As the narrator passes the home of well-known families, she makes significant comments. They show that the "dangers and troubles" of life which she thinks make her steps heavy, causing her shoes to mash up too quickly and her mother to complain, also affect the families.

In the Austin home lives Norbert Austin who got hit in the eye by a stone and now has one good eye and one glass eye. The Blythe property, which is the "size of a small farm," is the residence of Tim Blythe, a white man who, unlike other white people the narrator knows, actually herds cows. Other white people "own animals, ride animals, shoo away animals, but they do not herd animals." The children whisper about the man, with-out understanding the meanings of the words they'd heard from adults: "He is shell-shocked from the War." On the corner of one road is "Miss White; MISS White, with five children." Beside her is a house which, the adults say, was deliberately burnt down because of jealousy over "dead-left" [inheritance], another mysterious term.

The narrator also passes the home of Mrs Farrell and her three sons. Two sons are "well and handsome," but the third "has no arms and a very big head and he has to stay in bed all the time." He waves to the children passing by bouncing up and down on his bed.

Comments the narrator:

Mrs Farrell does not have a husband or money, but the house is big and they are white . . . We know the Farrells and they know us but we do not speak. We smile thin smiles and nod but we do not speak.

The families do not speak, though they attend the same church, because the Farrells are white while the narrator's family is not. Yet amid the details about school life, street hazards, and class and race prejudice, the narrator remains preoccupied with her small actions of carefully separating her slice of cake from its wax paper, eating the yellow cake itself, and, finally, the longed-for icing.

In "Hartstone High," the First Form girls of Hartstone High School discover that their form teacher sneaks off every Friday afternoon to have sex with the principal, a married man with children. The trysts begin when a new girl with an unknown background comes to the school; they stop when they are discovered. Right after this, the girl leaves. The reader is given just enough information to infer that the form teacher and the new girl are related, and the principal is extorting sex from the form teacher in exchange for allowing the new girl to stay at the school. The narrator herself never realizes what is happening.

In "Corinthians Thirteen Thirteen," the young female narrator tells of meeting "the dirtiest man she ever see in her whole entire life." The man is white and he is drinking at the community standpipe by sucking on the pipe. The story turns on the mysteries of who the man is, why he has come to the community, and what his questionable relationship with the black Sister Gertie and her brown daughter is. We learn that the man is dirty because he has been robbed of his clothes, that he is sucking on the pipe because arthritis prevented him from cupping his hands to catch water, and that, years before, while married, he had a sexual relationship with Gertie, a relationship that resulted in the birth of a daughter.

In "Chalk it up," a preschool child describes, without understanding their significance, events in the life of her unhappy, mentally ill mother: the finding of the torn-up pieces of her wedding photograph, her uncertain smile contrasting with the big smiles of those around her; her continual need of rest, her fits of crying, her inability to care for her children. This inability is proved, at least in the mind of her husband and neighbors, when the narrator falls and twists her ankle. The adults blame the mother, and soon an ambulance comes to take the mother away—to where, the narrator does not know. She wonders: "Maybe she is going to foreign . . . to the place where Mr Lionel is, where there is money to send by Western Union and everybody have a telephone."

Not all the stories are viewed through children's eyes. A young Canadian missionary, Father Martin, is abducted and later murdered in "Shining Waters." He had been trying to give help to a small rural community in which he had come to live. The final story, "Once on the shores of the stream, Senegambia . . . ," which has the dream-like quality and quick cuts of a Fellini film, contains a mango-seed sucking character walking with a basket balanced:

. . . sure and steady, on her head. While she walking, she talking: "Once upon a time, Brer Anansi was hungry bad, more hungry then he ever hungry before in his life, for a wicked famine was on the land. Brer Anansi hungry, him wife hungry, and the poor little spider-pikni them dying of starvation . . . "

Here, as elsewhere, Mordecai manages the cadences of Jamaican speech without distorting the Standard English orthography, and generally she vividly captures the sights and sounds of Jamaica, where she was born and raised. Because of the accuracy of her ear for speech, the precision of her eye for the significant detail, because she avoids the sensation-al as she tells her stories from the point of view of the ordinary person (child or adult), Mordecai achieves authenticity.

Pink Icing and Other Stories is indeed a not-so-simple work, but it is a wonderful one.

Michael Reckord