Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean

o ride the train from Bath to Bradford-on-Avon, as Eric Walrond did after evacuating London, is to thread eight miles of a pastoral idyll. Sloping gently to the River Avon, the meadows south of the Cotswold Mountains are embroidered with low stone fences, and for long stretches sheep and cows seem to be Wiltshire County’s only residents. If Bath is Jane Austen, Wiltshire is Thomas Hardy, all copses and closes. In Bradford-on-Avon, limestone buildings line the narrow lanes that meander up from the valley. It had a grittier, prosaic feel when Walrond arrived in 1939, but in many respects it has retained its appearance. From the station, he crossed a sturdy thirteenth-century bridge on the edge of which sat a stone oubliette, a suspended jail of sorts, added in the seventeenth century to detain drunkards. To the left was the venerable Swan Hotel, established in 1500 and named after the graceful creatures patrolling eddies under the bridge. To the right lay the commercial district known as the Shambles, a tumbling nest of shops. Lifting his gaze up the hill that led to his house, Walrond could see the spires of the churches of St. Mary Tory, of Holy Trinity, an eleventh-century Saxon church originally built by King Aethelred for the nuns of Shaftesbury, and on the hilltop in the distance, of Christ Church. Across from Christ Church was Ivy Terrace, where Walrond lived for twelve years.¹

He was the only black person in a town of four thousand residents. Communities of color had formed in cities outside of London, particularly in the ports, but Bradford-on-Avon was classically English—beautiful but austere, a Saxon town. The tablets of Stonehenge lay a few miles to the west, and the most striking monument of all, a tremendous tithe barn, all 168 feet of it covered by a thatch roof, flanked the canal as it had since 1341. It would be an exaggeration to say that time stood still in Bradford, but in the 1940s history was palpably present. It was a far cry from New York, farther still from the Caribbean.

Bradford’s strangeness was not just a matter of race; it was amplified by the absence of modern conveniences to which Londoners were accustomed. When electricity arrived in the 1920s it reliably reached only the commercial district. One could purchase groceries and household goods from the shops in town or from merchants who hawked goods from trucks, but Ivy Terrace residents relied on the produce of their gardens. Walrond’s neighbors, the Cottles, packed a family of six in a two-room house. “We used to have a toilet down in the garden,” a Bradford resident recalled, “perhaps one between two or three families.”² Bradford was not without comforts, however; by the 1940s, the cinema showed three Hollywood features a week, sixteen pubs served the community, and trains to London and Bath were frequent and inexpensive, especially the “Woolworth’s train,” on which a return trip to Bath cost a mere 4½ pence on Saturday.³ Walrond was not the only stranger in the village, as wartime evacuation continued apace: four thousand trains removed nearly 1.5 million people in the first four days of September alone. Bradford’s relative safety made it a popular destination, receiving more than one thousand evacuees.⁴

Walrond was unusual, one of the few who stayed on after 1940, when most evacuees returned, and of course he was “coloured.” His writing during his twelve years in Bradford is instructive in its treatment of race relations. Many of the difficulties he faced in London persisted, but Bradford lacked the simmering antagonism that characterized the cities and ports. In this respect, Walrond may have preferred village life to someplace with a black community. James Baldwin wrote incisively about this paradox in “Stranger in the Village.” He was shocked to discover what a spectacle his blackness became in his adopted hometown in the Alps in the 1950s. Local children pointed and called him “Neger,” but he was reluctant to equate their name-calling with American racism. The paradox of the racial stranger for Baldwin was that although he would never feel he belonged, he was spared the extreme indignities of places in which tension and acrimony had been normalized.

This seems to have been the case with Walrond. He rented a room in the last of a row of nine stone cottages from a couple named Porter. “Of course, the unusual thing was that he was a black man,” said his neighbor Gerald Bodman, “That was very unusual for Bradford. […] In fact, he was the only black man in the area, really, and of course people talk about that sort of thing, naturally enough, because it’s most unusual for a little country town.”⁵ Walrond was friendly but less gregarious now, keeping so much to himself that some Ivy Terrace residents did not know he was a writer, much less a writer of renown. They speculated that he was involved in the war effort. He was kind but reserved, saying hello but not much more. “He was a very nice fellow, friendly,” according to Bodman, though “to be honest,” John Cottle added, “he didn’t talk a lot to anybody. He was a very private sort of guy.”⁶ “As next-door neighbors you mingle and chat over things,” said Bodman, “He may well have spoken of his life in America, [but] I can’t recall any detail about that. But I remember him as a jolly nice man indeed. Obviously very well educated.” Mary Lane, a neighbor who was starting a family, recalls talking with him in the street but “not a great deal.” In her case, the limited contact may have involved more than his reticence. “He was coloured,” she said, “Not black; he was coloured. Because they used to pull my leg—my daughter had very dark skin. And they used to pull my leg and say, because she had dark curly hair, and she had, not dark skin but she wasn’t fair-skinned.” The miscegenation anxiety behind the teasing was characteristic of the time, when interracial relationships and mixed-race children were widely deplored.⁷

The Porters used the cottage mainly in summer, so Walrond often had it to himself, and even when they were in residence Mr. Porter’s job kept him away for long stretches. This raised some eyebrows. “In itself, that was a bit of a phenomenon in those days,” recalled Cottle, “a black guy living with a white woman. Now when I say ‘living with him,’ we don’t know what their domestic arrangements were.” Gerald Bodman did not think the relationship was romantic. “I have no recollection of that ever even being considered, thought about. They both lived in the same house,” but we “never had any thoughts whatsoever that it was anything but that.” Neighbors called him Mr. Walrond and treated him respectfully. With children, he chatted and played on occasion with their rabbits and chickens. With the family of Gerald Bodman, ten years older than Cottle, Walrond “used to talk quite a bit.” Bodman and Mary Lane knew he was a writer, though he did not discuss particulars. Nor did he assert his West Indianness. “He may well have mentioned it,” Bodman said, “But we took him generally to be an American.” They only knew “he was a journalist. He worked for a paper back in the States, and he would write articles for the paper and submit them weekly, or maybe monthly. And I think it was a paper read mainly by black people in the States.”

Amsterdam News readers were introduced to Walrond through his “inner glimpse of London as war clouds appeared,” composed just prior to his evacuation. Under the cryptic byline “Somewhere in England,” he reported Britons’ impatience with the Allies’ progress on the western front and with the Americans, who had not yet entered the war. He endeavored to depict his village, transformed by wartime events.

He highlighted the contributions to the war effort of two distinct but related populations: colonial subjects serving the “mother country” and the descendants of immigrants living in Britain. In “Black Britons on War Front,” Walrond chronicled the “coloured men” of the British Expeditionary Force, fighting “side by side with the African and West Indian troops,” hastening to note that they were not “natives of overseas territories, but English-born sons of Negro fathers and white mothers from the ‘half-caste’ communities of Britain” (“Black Britons” 1). This was a powerful argument for changing public opinion about a mixed-race segment of the population that was growing but widely reviled. He canvassed the Bristol docks, interviewing West Indians, including a Jamaican who professed his countrymen’s loyalty: “When the news of the declaration of war came through, there were swarms of people ‘round the news bulletins outside the newspaper offices, and everyone I met was anxious and impatient to help the Mother Country, starting to volunteer for service at once” (“Black Britons” 10). Walrond risked a provisional assessment: “So far as can be ascertained, the colour bar in the British Army has been jettisoned. Coloured men are [ … ] being given a chance to show their fighting qualities” (“Black Britons” 1). It proved premature, he soon realized.

He reported on six young Jamaicans whose “loyalty to king and empire” led them to stowaway on a steamship bound for London, only to be jailed upon arrival. They were given “four weeks imprisonment, each with hard labor,” and several were labeled “stateless” and “recommended for deportation” despite their desire to “join the British Army and help finish off Hitler” (“Jail” 1). He also reported that a ban of “coloured men” from the Royal Air Force (RAF) had been extended from Africa and the West Indies to India. This was galling because “in the last war the people of India made to the Allied cause a staggering contribution of men and money,” and Walrond hoped that Nehru’s insurgent Congress Party would win its demands for dominion status, thus removing the “colour bar” from India (“Racial Bar Persists” 1). He praised the neighboring Burmese for having seized the opportunity the war presented to press their demands at Whitehall (“Ireland” 6). When reports reached him that a group of South African mineworkers had voluntarily pledged a portion of their meager salaries to purchase a battleship for the Allies, he recorded his skepticism. “Most of them are detribalized workers of poor physique from the more remote parts of the African bush” (“Ireland” 6). He found it hard to believe they “met together of their own accord,” as reported, and decided “to donate a shilling or about 25 cents a month towards the cost” of a battleship; that was “stretching one’s credulity a little too far.” His optimism at the war’s impact on race relations wavered.

Walrond’s own mother did not know where to find him, so she could not direct the Guggenheim Foundation, which inquired in May 1940. “I was in correspondence with him, but since the war I haven’t heard from him.”⁸ But Walrond contacted Ethel Ray Nance soon after the evacuation, suggesting she forward his new address “to C. S. J. or anyone else who may enquire.”⁹ Nance informed Charles Johnson and mailed Walrond the notes accompanying his rejection from The Atlantic.¹⁰ Johnson and Nance brainstormed on his behalf, speculating that the Associated Negro Press “probably needs a good foreign reporter.”¹¹ The extent to which Walrond had vanished from American view is illustrated in an exchange a Panamanian writer had with W. E. B. Du Bois in 1941. “Recently I began […] a study of the Isthmian Negro scene,” he wrote Du Bois, wondering whether North American publishers would be interested. Du Bois answered, “there is no doubt of the need” of such a study; “Eric Walrond once planned and partially finished a study called The Big Ditch which treated the Panama Canal and the various West Indian Negroes who worked upon it. [ … ] I have often wondered what became of that manuscript.”¹² Walrond had the opportunity to apprise Du Bois when they met in London years later. For the moment, however, he remained the subject of speculation.

Henry Allen Moe managed to locate Walrond in 1940, and Walrond’s reply reveals his shame at having disappointed him. He wished to assure Moe that he had not been idle, but the letter exudes insecurity.

Under separate cover I am sending you copies of some of the things which I have published since I returned to Europe in 1932. If you find that the quality of the stuff is poor, or that the quantity is absurd, I beg of you not to judge me too harshly. No one feels more keenly than I do the inadequacy of my performance up to date. However, I wish to assure you, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that I have not lost sight of my responsibility to the Foundation. My obligation to you personally, to those who were good enough to act as my sponsors and to the community at large is ever before me. Unfortunately, as a depression casualty, I have had my ups and downs; my quest for security in a world in which nothing is stable led me astray. Yet even now (I think it was Robert Herrick who, after examining my project, said it was a “life-work”) with everything more insecure than ever before, all my energies are being directed towards one end, namely to produce something which would in some small measure justify the confidence which the Foundation so generously reposed in me twelve years ago!¹³

The trail grows cold at this point—conspicuously so. He stopped writing for the Amsterdam News, which named Padmore its London correspondent in May 1940. Aside from a short story that appeared in the West Indian Review, Walrond published nothing until late 1944, when he resumed with the Amsterdam News and began contributing to The People’s Voice and The Monthly Summary. John Cottle recalled him traveling to London and inferred it “was something to do with the Ministry of Defence.” Nothing corroborates the supposition, but the front page of the Chicago Defender in April 1944 announced Walrond’s disappearance and presumed death in an airstrike over Germany. The report of his death was, as Mark Twain said, an exaggeration, but the article raises questions about whether it was a case of mistaken identity or had some basis in fact. “Eric Waldron [sic], Novelist, Lost In German Air Raid,” read the headline.

However unlikely, it would account for his four-year silence, and while this too may be a coincidence, when he resumed writing in 1944 it was about black servicemen. He covered two cases in which sexual relations between white Englishwomen and African American GIs were criminalized.¹⁶ And he resumed coverage of English and colonial race relations. “White Airmen in England Protest Treatment of Negro Comrades” discussed the twelve hundred West Indians who volunteered when the RAF issued “an urgent appeal for ground-staff tradesmen.” After several months in England, they were discouraged by the “colour bar”: “seemingly trivial incidents have been mounting up and helping to make their lot [ … ] well nigh unbearable,” including prohibitions against socializing with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (16). Nevertheless, servicemen from the colonies persevered, developing skills and forging new roles for themselves and their people (“Britain Spurs” 6).

As “London Correspondent of the People’s Voice,” Walrond articulated positions far to the left of The Amsterdam News. He accused newly elected Labour Party leaders of maintaining status quo foreign policy as the war drew to a close (“Soapbox” 5). He reproached British fecklessness as Italy’s “trail of terror” advanced in Ethiopia (“Italy” 22). And he inveighed against Britain’s exploitation of colonial troops, accusing the “ruling class” of using Indians the same way the French had used the Senegalese, “to do Imperialism’s dirty work” (“Indian Troops” 13). West Indians enlisting to make the world safe for democracy were instead deployed to suppress Burmese resistance (“West Indians” 9). But the most compelling People’s Voice article was a look back at the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic during World War I. Dominicans had been lulled into a false sense of security, he suggested, “basking in the sunlight of the Monroe Doctrine” (“Men” 21). He depicted U.S. Marines in the same terms he had in Tropic Death: “Lean young men in khaki with thin red necks and a southern drawl swaggered about with big Colt revolvers dangling from thigh or hip” (“Men” 21). During his visit in 1929, five years after the marines withdrew, residents were perplexed by the occupation because “all classes in the community agreed” to leave “all hands off the Yankee sugar properties” (“Men” 21). Walrond believed the United States wished to destabilize the political field in order to install a puppet president. He observed that Trujillo, who soon ruled the country with exceptional venality, was permitted to wear his National Guard uniform during the occupation while in others this was an affront to the Americans (“Men” 21). Residents placed their faith in the peasants of the Cibao region, who organized a resistance movement that earned the Americans’ contempt as “bandits,” much like the cacos in Haiti.

Walrond’s critique of U.S. designs on the Caribbean was characteristic of a fleeting but forceful alignment of antiracist and anticolonial journalism during World War II. The U.S. State Department cautioned in 1944 that African American periodicals across the political spectrum were advancing critiques of “white imperialism.”¹⁷ Until the Cold War, the African American press linked the civil rights struggle with the liberation of colonized people the world over, challenging not only “French and British imperialism but the role of the American government and U.S. corporations in the rapidly changing global political economy.”¹⁸ These were precisely the questions Walrond raised by revisiting the Dominican occupation: “Are [today’s] peasant masses of Indo-China and Indonesia forged in the metal of the hardy hut-dwellers of Hispaniola?” he asked, “Are they destined to duplicate the epic stand of the men of the Cibao?” (“Men” 21).

As Walrond started writing for The People’s Voice, Charles Johnson hired him to contribute to The Monthly Summary of Events and Trends in Race Relations. Established at Fisk University and sponsored by the Rosenwald Fund, The Monthly Summary was aimed at “persons interested in or working directly with the current problems of race in our American democracy,” but in fact its scope was international. With a small stable of contributors, its bylines were generally omitted because subscribers, many of whom were policymakers, “are not in need of inspirational material and personal viewpoints.” Its operative definition of race was broader than most African American periodicals, featuring articles on Japanese Americans, Jews, and many others, an illustration of the journal’s alertness to the shifting terrain of race in the 1940s.¹⁹ Walrond contributed seven articles, drawing extensively on formal research. This was Johnson’s preference, and he called the “application of the social survey technique to the current scene” the “special feature” of the publication.²⁰ Some of Walrond’s work dovetailed with his other writing, such as “Education and Training of Negroes and Indians in Britain” and analyses of conditions in Liverpool and Cardiff. But he went farther afield, monitoring the fraught negotiations over British policy in Africa as the war drew to a close. He shone a bright light on systemic racial bias in South Africa, Rhodesia, and Kenya, not typical fare for the American press.²¹ By the end of 1946, The Monthly Summary circulation reached nearly ten thousand, with “reporting services” in thirty-eight cities.²²

Colonial matters may have held interest for Monthly Summary readers, but the most intriguing reading about segregation was Walrond’s writing about race relations in Britain. This dynamic was influenced by the deployment there of African American troops, segregated from their white counterparts. The enlistment of nonwhite colonial troops in the British military created a combustible situation, and Walrond treated Wiltshire as a case study in English racial attitudes. African American troops stationed in Westwood in 1942 used Bradford as their designated recreation site, while white American troops were sent to Trowbridge, three miles away. “It was the first time that many townsfolk had seen a non-white person,” notes historian Margaret Dobson.²³ Walrond’s neighbors remembered it vividly. Gerald Bodman was a civil engineer in a munitions factory, and he recalled having socialized with the visiting troops. Although there were virtually no other nonwhites in the area, he said the residents “generally didn’t worry anything about” the African Americans “because we weren’t, shall I say, overrun by them, there were comparatively few. The camp at Westwood was a comparatively small one. And obviously they couldn’t all be away from camp at the same time.” The town organized “parties for the G.I.s. [ … ] Impromptu concerts followed where the visitors sang lovely spirituals. The Americans were seen regularly swimming by the River Avon, and [ … ] dances were held at the old Town Hall.”²⁴ The portrait of interracial harmony was confirmed by John Cottle, who recalled the black Americans fondly.

Walrond was intrigued by the local response to black troops, American and West Indian alike. He recognized an eagerness among English officials to distance themselves from racial segregation, and he saw the war as a mechanism for compelling them to do so. But he also perceived a recalcitrant racism in the very fabric of English culture and believed local antiracist campaigns were necessary. As always, he cast these concerns in connection with daily life, writing at least three accounts of wartime Wiltshire, one a short story for The Crisis in 1948 and two nonfiction essays for The Monthly Summary.²⁵

“Chippenham’s Way” chronicled a Wiltshire town collectively overcoming racial prejudice after a brazen imposition of the “colour bar.” It was a true story but had all the elements of melodrama: nationalist fervor, football, young men in uniform, young ladies at a dance, and the triumph of Christian fellowship. Walrond observed that Chippenham had seen armies come and go for centuries, but until World War II the troops had never been black.

He recognized that the presence of a segregated U.S. military raised questions about how Britons would respond, both in civilian and military contexts, and conversely how English behavior would influence race relations among American troops. “Some American officers are apparently interested in bringing the segregated transportation system to England, at least for the [war’s] duration,” he wrote, citing a Cardiff-bound train on which “two coloured American soldiers” were instructed by white American officers to leave their car. The officers eventually relented, but on alighting one chastised the conductor, “You English are making it hard for us; when we get back to America we shall not be able to manage these fellows” (“Colour Bar” 229). Walrond covered other instances, including “restrictive covenants” in rentals and discrimination in restaurants and hotels. The Crisis ran his story suggesting that English reluctance to discriminate on the basis of race emboldened African American troops and constrained the behavior of white officers. Set at the Bradford-on-Avon bus station, it was not only Walrond’s last publication in a prominent American periodical, it was likely the first literary text in the United States to feature black Britons and black Americans. Despite its flaws, “By the River Avon” is a fascinating meditation on the tension between distinctive racial formations—one American, one British. It turns on the significance of a military salute, a gesture whose simplicity is belied by its complex social function. The characters include an African American GI who flirts with his English sweetheart as the story opens, a mixed-race factory worker, two of his white colleagues, and two American servicemen, one white and one black, patrolling in a jeep. Times were changing, the story suggested, and despite lingering prejudices, Bradford sought to demonstrate liberality and gratitude toward African American troops. They were even welcomed at afternoon tea in Bradford’s oldest tearoom, which made their white officers uneasy. The English were shifting the ground of race relations at home, Walrond indicated, and by extension among the Americans stationed there.

Occasional publication was not enough to make ends meet, so Walrond took a job at a rubber manufacturing plant. Employee records were destroyed in a fire, but Gerald Bodman recalled Walrond “saying he was having to work pretty hard. It was different for him; it was factory work.”²⁶ Adding to his stress was wartime rationing and the fact that Bradford, although removed from the theater of war, was not immune to violence. Bristol, Bath, and Cardiff were key targets, and the nerves of Bradford residents were frayed by air raid sirens. The Germans “used to go over every night,” said a Bradford man, on bombing runs to Cardiff, Avonmouth, Bristol, and Bath.²⁷ In April 1942, a German bomber chased from Bath by RAF planes jettisoned four bombs near Bradford, damaging buildings and the canal but sparing residents. Two years later, Ivy Terrace was shaken by a crash behind Christ Church, when a Canadian fighter-plane burst into flames, killing all but one crewmember. Even after the war’s end life was difficult; residents coping with austerity and rationing through the early 1950s. Despite the jubilation when hostilities subsided, postwar life was far from easy.

Having published nothing in more than a year, Walrond contacted Gwendolyn Bennett in 1946. He was feeling every bit of his nearly forty-eight years, but he put a brave face on things. He could not quite bring himself to ask for help, but he would clearly have welcomed it. Calling her “Dear Gwennie,” he claimed, “The young Negro boy about whom you once wrote a poem is, alas! no longer young, but he is still pretty sure of himself at times and his courage, even though a bit erratic, can still be quite phenomenal.” He mentioned having submitted something to The American Mercury but “failed to see eye to eye” with its editors “on something which I spent a lot of time and energy on, about Negro GIs in Britain.” Before signing himself “Down, but definitely not out!” he added, “Don’t forget, you are still the closest approximation to a favourite sister I have ever had!”²⁸ What is striking, however, is the number of people Walrond seems not to have contacted. No further correspondence with Charles Johnson, who became president of Fisk University in 1947. No apparent contact with Una Marson, who helped start the important BBC program Caribbean Voices. No reference to the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester—a pivotal event—nor any contact, evidently, with old London friends. Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes were developing a new anthology and “right off” thought “of Eric Walrond’s pieces on Harlem,” but he was not reachable.²⁹ British Guiana’s first literary journal, Kyk-over-Al, was established in 1945, but there is no record of contact with editor A. J. Seymour. Nor is there any indication that Walrond was in touch with his daughter Lucille, who enrolled in 1945 at the University of London.³⁰ A gifted scholar who went on to teach at the University of the West Indies, Lucille eventually visited her father in 1953. Instead one finds a record of withdrawal, a postwar silence. It cannot have helped that Countée Cullen died in 1946, his brilliant career cut short by a cerebral hemorrhage at 43. Knowing what followed for Walrond, one explanation for his withdrawal may have been worsening depression. Turning inward was a coping mechanism he had tried in the past, and it may have seemed like the only available response to adversity.

However, he managed to get three pieces of journalism into print in the United States. The first told of Britain’s plans to establish universities in Africa, Malaya, and the West Indies, appearing in the Journal of Higher Education. The second, an essay in Carter Woodson’s Negro History Bulletin, chronicled the life of a nineteenth-century Barbadian physician who served France nobly in the Franco-Prussian War. Then in June 1948, three ships from the West Indies brought several hundred immigrants to England, capturing Walrond’s attention and the attention of many others. It was the first wave of an influx that gathered momentum and soon began transforming British national identity. Beginning with fewer than one thousand arrivals per year, the generation of West Indian immigrants that took its name from the first of the ships, the SS Empire Windrush, swelled to 161,450 in the years between 1955 and 1960.³¹ Among them were Sam Selvon and George Lamming, talented writers and ardent followers of Caribbean Voices, whose novels would give eloquent expression to their exile. Writing in 1948, Walrond was among the first to attend closely to the arrival of the Windrush for what it presaged for the future, publishing an investigative report in the Christian Science Monitor. Anxious about the newcomers’ employment prospects, he spoke with a representative of the Colonial Welfare Office in London, and although the official conceded that some of the passengers were unemployed in Liverpool and Manchester, job placement on the whole was successful (“Negro Migrants” 9). Through interviews with laborers and personnel managers, Walrond determined that instances of discrimination on the basis of color and nationality were rare. When it came to unions, however, his report equivocated, suggesting that immigrant laborers were safe while jobs were plentiful but were otherwise vulnerable to layoffs. The questions Walrond asked gained urgency over the next decade as West Indians arrived in greater numbers.

Walrond contacted Robert Herring, editor of the London journal Life and Letters, perhaps because Herring was interested in Caribbean writing, traveling to Jamaica in 1948 and publishing two Caribbean-themed issues. This was an ideal contact, but all that came of it was a handful of book reviews.³² Here was a figure for Walrond’s marginality—relegated to reviewer in the same journal in which Lamming and Edgar Mittelholzer were introduced to UK readers. Walrond reviewed a novel by a Scotsman set in Trinidad and England, a novel by a Chinese author writing in English, and a “passing” novel about a mixed-race Alabama girl who flees Jim Crow for Europe but returns to join the civil rights struggle. But the reviews revealed little of his critical acumen, much less his writing talent. These were more evident in his reviews of the African Americans Richard Wright and Roi Ottley and the Jamaican Edna Manley. Ottley earned Walrond’s praise for Black Odyssey, an expansive history of African American experience, and Manley he commended for having celebrated Jamaican writing since the early 1940s. This work recalled his New York writing, the erudition and energy of which he also demonstrated in reviewing Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices. Together, these reviews demonstrate what an asset Walrond could have been to an English journal, a reviewer of considerable versatility who had taken part in modernist movements on both sides of the Atlantic and cut his teeth on black liberation struggles in the Caribbean and in the United States. Moreover, Walrond’s fiction would seem to be ideal for a journal pursuing a cultural pluralist vision that was new to England, but he never made it beyond the book reviews.

An observation he made reviewing Manley’s anthology is significant in this regard: “The form which the writing of a subject people takes is often, of necessity, oblique.” He was referring to stories in Focus: Jamaica that bore “no relation to Carib lore or to Anancy tales of African origin” but were “in reality allegories—poetical, lucid, chock-full of content” (177). This question of form was one that New Negro writers had negotiated with discernment and sophistication. Defending the oblique as a “necessity” in the writing of “subject people,” he anticipated later arguments advanced by theorists of Caribbean poetics: that Caribbean writing, in devising its modes of expression, may not follow established conventions, that its signal formal feature might in fact be opacity. For Edouard Glissant in the 1970s, formal “failure” was inherent in the project of Caribbean writing, a symptom of its fraught relation to history. “Its advance will be marked by a polyphony of dramatic shocks, at the level of the conscious as well as the unconscious, between incongruous phenomena or “episodes” so disparate that no link can be discerned. Majestic harmony does not prevail here, but [ … ] an anxious and chaotic quest.”³³ Walrond asserted something similar, justifying the formally oblique in Manley’s selections. He was also referencing his own fiction, that impetuousness readers never failed to note. As he returned now to writing almost exclusively about the Caribbean in subsequent fiction, much of it flawed on conventional grounds, he was asserting the integrity of disintegrative work, insisting even the oblique could be “poetical, lucid, chock-full of content.”

“Poor Great” (1950) was his first story published in England since 1936. It appeared in a London quarterly, Arena, bundled with two Sam Selvon stories. “Poor Great” is about black middle-class childhood in Georgetown, specifically the community’s uneasy reaction to a group of indigenous people who beg for handouts. Alarmed, the six-year-old protagonist is too young to grasp the broader context. He feels torn between the responses recommended by the housemaid, a Barbadian, and the servant, a Guyanese. The Barbadian empathizes, offering biscuits, while the Guyanese, fearful of “witchcraft,” says “send them away, soul. Le’ them go to the almshouse” (322).³⁴ The story reveals the narrator’s relative privilege despite his family’s modest means. This is one sense in which he is poor great, a common West Indian phrase. But poor great also means false grandeur—pride or pretension beyond one’s station in life.³⁵ And here the story becomes more interesting, a meditation not only on Walrond’s childhood but also, obliquely, on his advanced age in England. Everyone in Georgetown sold goods to make ends meet, from the sugar cakes and corn pone set at the front gate, to the women in “white calico skirts” hawking tamarind syrup (324). But one who does not even attempt self-sufficiency is an elderly mendicant. “He begged his daily bread,” and “as he went doddering along in the sun, weaving across the road, his hat outstretched in his hand,” he was greeted genially: “Housewife after housewife would lean over the garden gate or zinc paling and hand him the leavings of a meal which Mr. Underwood, with a ‘God bless you!’ or a nod of silent gratitude would seize and instantly devour” (325). Despite his acceptance, Mr. Underwood is derided by the churlish neighborhood boys, his artificial leg matched by a swollen and scaly natural one, his “bearded face, drooping lips and mournful eyes” expressing “humility and distress” (325). The boys cry, “Br’r Goat comin’ down the road!” Scattering, they taunt him with a mischievous rhyme: “Who stole the goat?” “The man with the long coat?” “What smells so high?” “You mean like a Billy goat?” (325). When Mr. Underwood hobbles after them, the protagonist cowers under his porch. “Then from underneath the house I saw Mr. Underwood standing on the road directly in front of our gate. ‘You little poor great vagabond!” he shouted, waving a stick at me, ‘You wait till I catch all-yuh. It’s all-yuh that smell!’ Then he turned and, leaning heavily on the stick, limped back up the road” (326).

The story seems like little more than local color, bits of assembled nostalgia. It is a coming-of-age tale in which the protagonist has an epiphany about social stratification. But it takes on a different cast in relation to Walrond’s life in Wiltshire in the 1940s. In a sense, Walrond was, at age fifty, still like that boy, cursed to be poor great. He may well have believed he was meant for something better, his wounded pride resenting his modest station in life. In another sense, he may no longer have seen himself in the boy but in old Mr. Underwood, a pitiful spectacle indulged by the kindly townspeople whose weirdness children ridiculed. This may have been Walrond’s self-image, an apprehension of who he could become. Certainly he was poor great in the sense of feeling “too proud to accept charity or help that is really needed.”³⁶ His neighbors were not aware of it, nor were friends and family, but Walrond’s depression had become unmanageable. One can imagine how stress and alienation contributed to his deterioration. Things reached a breaking point in early 1952 and he sought treatment at a county psychiatric hospital.³⁷ We may never know exactly what drove him there, but his sporadic record of publication, his neglect of friends and supporters, and his exile in a rural, overwhelmingly white village must have aggravated his longstanding condition. He decided to check himself into the Roundway Psychiatric Hospital, a sprawling compound on the outskirts of a nearby town, in early May. Although he was a voluntary patient, he would remain there five years. Among the manuscripts he brought with him were a dozen unpublished Caribbean stories and the yellowing pages of his Panama history. In this unlikely place, he finally saw them into print.