is a remarkable collection of short stories about real children living real lives. It sits on a simple tenet: in Ross's world - a world of subtly-hinted-at political turmoil and uncertainty - to be a child and to survive one cannot afford to be innocent. His characters confront curfews, hunger as well as themselves and assume adult responsibilities while they absorb the crucial life lessons that would assure their passage through to adulthood.
In A Game of Marbles, Ken, a young boy walks out into a curfew to find food and in the process literally destroys the house of the 'govment man' who employs him as errand boy. Ross
presents us with a child that is both provider and destroyer. In The Room Inside
Gigi, a young girl is in an adjacent room listening to the women of her family helping her mother deliver a child. The final chapter both pleases and surprises by moving her from passive listener to the center of one of the most intimate of women's spaces.
The Return is a beautiful, haunting piece about forbidden love and cultural alienation in which a brother and a sister swim out to sea and never return.
Cultural alienation and
reclaiming is picked up and explored very powerfully in the title story Song for Simone. Ross portrays a young girl on the threshold of womanhood, who is experiencing not only physical and
emotional transformations but also deep psychic shifts regarding her own view of her self and her cultural inheritance.
There is a male treatment to the title story in Cold Hole
- a piece about a boy who on his birthday goes out to face a challenge that entails confronting his worst fears: isolation, the forest, superstition and a still, dark, deep river pool that is home to an almost mythical crayfish which he must capture. There is a lot of pleasure to be had in uncovering the symbolism in the text: the fact that it is the boy's 13th birthday, his sight of his own blood, the plunge into the pool, the crushing of the crayfish, the images of light and darkness in the final passage and his scream 'down the long gaping river-corridor, ...through the sunless silence and shade.'
And then there are The Kite (in which a boy in a fit of outrage turns on one of his companions) and Dark is the Hour
that looks at the way a man's violence against his children gets converted to something more giving and tender in a moment of self-realisation and desperation. In fact in another sense the stories are about the relationship between love and violence - violence that is both physical and pshychological. There is a lot to be gained from reading the stories with this in mind.
Evocative and tender is The Canebreakers - a portrait of Sis, a sugarcane worker, as seen through the eyes of young Baldie. The Canebreakers
is a real homage to the strength, dignity and vision of Caribbean womanhood.
The only story that does not deal with young children, ostensibly, is Oleander Road. A young dying soldier
is trying to get home. by foot The road is both his enemy. and his friend. The soldier's fading consciousness focuses us on this ambivalence and on the history of this road, which is in fact the
history of the community to which he is struggling to return.
Ross's real gift lay in his ability to invoke complex, multi-layered realities with language that is so deceptive in its
simplicity, even young people are engaged by the book. It has been used in numerous schools in the United Kingdom and abroad.
Song for Simone
was published in 1986 by Karia Press and it is a tribute to its strength that it is still in such demand. Song for Simone is scheduled for re-publication in December 2001.
Gayle Sojourn
