A House for Miss Pauline
“What if the houses of enslavement could speak? What would they say and to whom?”
This is the question Diana McCaulay asks in her notes at the end of A House for Miss Pauline and which she so forcefully answers in the novel itself as places of both remembrance and regret. Pauline is a story of pain, trauma, crime, fear, death, family, guilt, friendship and love all wrapped up enchantingly in the crucible of resistance and resilience, forged in the legacy of landlessness and dispossession with which the descendants of the formerly enslaved still grapple.
Pauline is memory simultaneously intertwined with history, with the vivid imagery typically associated with rural village life, eliciting the full range of human emotion from tragedy to triumph. A story that will appeal to young and old alike. One that you can’t help but complete in a single sitting – such is its exceptional readability and linguistic clarity. It is delightful, refreshingly candid and raw in every sense with the titular character as sprightly and lucid as ever on the cusp of her 100th birthday. Engaging and funny – owing to Pauline’s occasional but expected lapses with modern-day technology – the novel takes place in the actual community of Mason Hall, St. Mary – a place with which the author would belatedly discover she shares has an ancestral connection.
In this deftly crafted work, we are introduced to Miss Pauline Evadne Sinclair just one month shy of her centenary. As the novel progresses, we are captivatingly pulled in, eager to discover more of the events of the preceding one hundred years, but more importantly to find out what was there for Miss Pauline to atone for at this late stage of her life? In something seemingly of the occult, her house makes unsettling noises at night and ‘speaks’ to her in an eerie manner, possibly a warning that she must now right a historical wrong in the dying embers of her existence while she still has the chance.
The plot is simple. But it is anything but simplistic. We are soon invited into the deeper recesses of her memory over the course of the 20th Century and discover that Miss Pauline, at the dawn of adolescence stumbled upon a former Great House in ruins (backra house), itself based on the real life Fontabelle Great House in the Cockpit Country. In adulthood, Pauline becomes Mason Hall’s most prominent Ganja farmer but later grew increasingly frustrated with the fragility of her family’s house, with Hurricane Charlie providing the final devastating blow.
She soon takes matters into her own hands, building for her family a much sturdier structure that can withstand frequent battering from storms. However, Pauline does this in the most unconventional way beyond anyone’s wildest conceptions. It is the stuff made of folklore and could easily form part of the rich and diverse tapestry of Jamaican storytelling, except that Pauline retains a striking element of realism that distinguishes it from popular tales which mythologize all too many aspects of Jamaica’s history. As a work of fiction, it is not only believable but wholly relatable. We are Pauline and most of us want to be her, for she embodies the spirit of the struggle for better, driven by an innate force undergirded by the deepest impulses for retribution, intolerant and loathsome of injustice. Pauline is more than a story of land, inheritance (“dead lef” in Jamaican parlance) and money. It is also a tale of power and survival – “…we are the descendants of the ones they couldn’t kill. Me is here cause some of them and them pickney survive…them tek from we, me tek from them.”
And so, the story come to bump, as is repeated throughout the novel. Or so we thought. Land has been a site of contestation, both literally and figuratively, in post-colonial Jamaica. Even today, with the booming real estate and construction industry, more persons (and institutional margin-gatherers) are looking to own a slice of the Rock more than ever before. Beneath this desire for land lies the more perverse issues of wealth extraction, the exacerbation of inequality and the proliferation of unaffordable living, with the racial dimensions of historical land ownership also brought into even sharper focus. Which groups of individuals and entities own most of the land, what colour are the richest landowners and how did they come to acquire it? More importantly, what barriers exist to land ownership for the vast majority of the Black population, why do they remain so stubborn to overcome and why does land tenure remain so insecure for many of the descendants of the formerly enslaved? The structural features of small societies confer an even greater importance on the role of land acquisition in the tooth-and-nail attempt to escape poverty.
Indeed, the argument could be made that you aren’t quite ‘rich’ until you’ve owned land. Few other asset classes appreciate in value so consistently, act so reliably as a hedge against inflation, and can be collaterized so readily. Despite its illiquidity, its possession imbues you with the ability to control the means of production – which is what backra did to the point of subjugation and brutality, paradigmatic of the worst form of capitalistic enterprise and its resulting social dislocation. The inclination for the commercial and industrial exploitation of land and its associated personnel perhaps transcends racial contours in its modern dispensation, precluding extensive settlement, driving up costs all-round due to speculative investment and rent-seeking behaviour, leading to the fragmentation of whole families, communities and the country’s very social fabric.
The antecedents of land ownership (and displacement) in Jamaica are well-known. Electoral franchise was tied to land possession and after Emancipation, the formerly enslaved were reduced to occupying only marginal lands, the acquisition of which was helped along by the Church. With the presence of the Great House, it would be easy to think of Pauline then as a typical ‘squatter’ on white man’s land in Mason Hall – “You cyah just tek it. Land have to own” – The innumerable conflicts over the years between so-called ‘squatters’ and the legal owners of the land upon which they have resided for years are also well-documented, with the residents fulfilling all legal obligations including the payment of property taxes – something Pauline had done dutifully all the years she’d been living there.
But Pauline was no mere squatter but she would soon be confronted with a demand for reclamation of the land with the intention to evict all ‘squatters’ and sell it. This demand would eventually result in an untimely death, a wrongful imprisonment, and generation-long wounds that required healing, only adding to the sense of mystery and intrigue.
In the present, the novel turns into a cross-country investigation under the pretext of a family-finding mission, the rigor of which one could scarcely believe was in the capacity of a 99-year old to undertake. Little did Pauline know that traversing the island would lead to what was perhaps the novel’s most consequential revelation.
Pauline’s confusion at the stunning turn of events is further compounded by the irreparable damage sustained by her house a few days later and she reflects on the irony of the thing she had defended for so long being suddenly reduced to rubble – “…Despite her shameful act, it has been taken from her anyway. The structure that cradled her life has been shaken apart…Stone has finally sundered.”
But what was this shameful act? Were all feelings of unease reconciled? What became of the land on which the Great House sat, the house and most importantly, Pauline herself? Readers will be on tenterhooks to discover what the house of enslavement said in Pauline, the meaning behind the message and how everything gradually unfolds.
Land. It is money. It is a source of wealth. It preserves the value of hard-won gains in the present for the future. But it is also finite. For someone to gain, another must lose. In this zero-sum game, people don’t only covet, or quarrel over it – they physically fight and go as far as to kill for it, though sometimes internecine warfare. Land connects generations of people and the respective tributaries of their descendants who have never even set foot there; who don’t even know about each other’s existence and in some instances, the act of merely having it for a long period of time may never come to benefit those who have worked so tirelessly to own a piece of it.
Pauline is a powerful narrative of forgiveness, reckoning, confession and redemption. It has certainly merited its place among contemporary Jamaican classics that will be remembered in the newly defined literary scene of the 21st century. Diana McCaulay is a literary virtuoso and with Pauline she has further cemented her standing in the Pantheon of great Caribbean fiction writers of the last two decades.