Guiana Belle

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (316 pp.)--Edgar Mittelholzer--John Day ($4).

Sylvia Russell's complexion was pale olive and her eyes were limpid hazelgreen, but her hair was her crowning glory. It was what British Guiana called "Good Hair": it came flaxen straight from her immigrant cockney father and gave no hint, by frizz or kink, that Sylvia's mother was "a low-class girl" of "Buck" (Guiana Indian) and Negro parentage. Sylvia could not claim to belong to "the respectable middle class" of old and established colored families, but she was tony enough to attend the Georgetown academy of Miss Jenkins (a colored lady who passed for white) and to look down on Negroes, Indians, Syrians, Chinese, Eurasians and mixtures thereof.

In a previous novel, Shadows Move Among Them (TIME, Sept. 17, 1951), Guiana's Edgar Mittelholzer showed a rare hand at distilling weird comedy from sex, religion and primitive passion. But his new novel (his sixth) is neither weird nor comic. It shows what happens when the laws of the jungle are replaced by the codes of the suburbs, and it portrays with grimness the lives of colored people whose worship of ancestral ju-jus has changed into keeping up with the Joneses.

Pride & Prejudice. Tough, affable Grantley Russell, son of a hall porter but now a well-to-do engineer, regards Guiana's caste system with a mocking grin. The only Englishman in the book, he can afford to be tolerant, promiscuous, and amused by the battle of the pigments. "Goo-goo, my high-color belle," he cries, tossing his little daughter Sylvia to the ceiling. "Where do you come into the picture? What's your rating?" Ostracized in her bedroom, shiftless mother Russell sits interminably over her Singer sewing machine and gossips with her "dark" friends about the latest scandalous marriage, in words that read like a Guiana parody of Pride and Prejudice:

"De family raving mad. Ah hear his mudder say he must never cross de threshold of her door again . . ."

"Serve dem right! ... All dese big puff-up high-color people--Ah never sorry when . . . they get tek down a peg or two."

"And his grandfadder was de Reverend Barton Dowden, a Presbyterian parson. And he had a great-grandfadder who was a manager of Plantation Vyfuisheid on de West Coast--a pure white man."

"Ow! You see dis world, eh? Godmudder used to say: 'Tek heed he dat stand lest he falleth' . . . Godmudder was a wise woman, yeh!"

By the time she is teenage, Sylvia can read the faintest marks and signs of caste as ably as a jungle tracker can read a spoor. But Sylvia, secure in the shelter of her father's wing, enjoys sticking her neck out. It is tedious always to be "Russell's daughter"--to swap sophisticated chaff with Daddy and his "high-color" business friends, to go to the Town Hall with "people of good family, olive-complexioned, with Good Hair." So Sylvia frequents the frame house of her Indian girl friend Naomi, where a gang of fascinating outcasts has created a Guiana version of Greenwich Village, a classless, promiscuous world where True Story and London's New Statesman and Nation share the same rickety table, and illegitimate moppets of varying shades of color crawl among the legs of "dark" Reds, "light" philosophers, and girls whose hair is unspeakably "bad."

Starvation or Prostitution. Mittelholzer spends half his novel building up this portrait of a girl who, thanks to her wealthy father, can keep what company she pleases. Then, with a bang, he pulls the carpet out from under his heroine. Father Russell is murdered. The jolly businessmen who laughed around his bridge table vanish into thin air--save for one who stays around long enough to pop the remains of Daddy's capital into his own pocket. By the end of the novel, Sylvia has sunk to a stratum from which death is the only escape, where crackers and condensed milk are deemed a nourishing meal and Good Hair is valued only because it is attractive to "dark" male customers.

The weakness of The Life and Death of Sylvia is that, having once got his unhappy heroine down, Mittelholzer never gives her a fair chance to get up: it is he, more than "society," who imposes on her the final alternatives of prostitution or starvation. But Sylvia remains one of the most gruesome studies of race relations ever written, precisely because its cast is composed almost entirely of colored people. Many novelists have stirred the human conscience with polemics in black & white, but Mittelholzer is among the first to explore the terrible underworld of shades where life and destiny hang upon a hair.

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