Did you know that Antigua and Barbuda has claim to a 19th-century novel that is regarded as an early example of Caribbean women’s writing? (Interestingly, for a long time, it was thought that the region’s literature had its beginnings in the mid-20th century.)
Did you know that this same novel, With Silent Tread, by Frieda Cassin, is, most likely, the first Antiguan novel?
It was long lost to Caribbean literary history, and only began receiving wider scholarly attention in the early 2000s following the discovery of its 1980s reveal by Antiguan linguist and scholar Bernadette Farquhar.
Arguably, the novel remains ‘lost’ outside of academia and so you might be unfamiliar with the following opening scene, and the pleas of an old, hungry, black-Antiguan leper character directed towards his former ‘Missis’ :
The leper hobbled forward to meet the carriage, and his successor, who knew him well, paused for a moment as he spoke.
‘Me dear Missis, me beg you a penny. So help me Gard I ain’t got a penny fo’ buy bread dis blessed night.‘
‘Drive on, Joseph,’ said the lady inside the carriage, calmly
‘Missis you don’ know me?’ exclaimed the man. ‘Me ole Pete dat sarbe you faitful fo’ nine year. Missis, me starving. Me darter dead, an me aint got nobody fo’ look fo’ me.‘
‘I never give to beggars,’ said the lady in the carriage. ‘Joseph drive on.’
‘Me don’t no beggar!’ cried the man passionately. ‘Missis knows me one decent man. Missis knows I did sarbe her faithfully! Fo’ de Lard sake me dear Missis….'(With Silent Tread, pgs. 35-36)
With Silent Tread was re-published in 2002 as part of the Macmillan’s Caribbean Classic series, with an introduction by Caribbean literary scholar, Evelyn O’Callaghan. With Silent Tread is set in “one of the smaller West Indian islands,” but all clues point to Antigua; place names–All Saints, for example, and the ‘dialect’ of the ‘black’ characters.
In her introduction to the reprinted novel, O’Callaghan reveals that she became aware of the novel through a Bulletin of Eastern Caribbean Affairs article written by fellow scholar, Bernadette Farquhar, who had found a copy of the book in the waste bin of the (old) St. John’s Public Library.
According to O’Callaghan, apart from the St. John’s copy, another (damaged) copy resides in the archives of the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda with yet another “rather battered copy” housed at the Institute of Jamaica Library.
The consensus is that With Silent Tread would have been published in 1890 or around 1888 to 1895.
It has been identified by scholar and Macmillan Caribbean Classics Series Editor, John Gilmore, as an “early example of a Caribbean novel by a woman writer… and probably the earliest novel of Antigua and Barbuda.”
O’Callaghan’s suggestion is that Frieda Cassin’s family were likely English derived, resident in the Eastern Caribbean for some period and members of the Antiguan elite. She also notes that Frieda Cassin’s involvement with The Carib, one of Antigua’s first literary journals, and her novel being so “very much grounded in the specifics of the place and period” is an indication of “a long familiarity with, if not birth in, the island.”
The subject of the novel? Reader, be aware! It is a novel published less than sixty years after Emancipation, about, and in, a society still very much entangled in the dark legacy of slavery. It is racist. Pointedly so. One ‘black’ character, as observed by an English visitor, is described as having a “heavy cunning face with lowering monkey-like brows, and a sulky pouting mouth”(pg. 69). There is a “mammy” figure/caricature. And, in one scene, ‘black’ characters are referenced as ‘these people’ who ‘have no conversation’ (pg.70).
19th-century Antigua and the West Indies in general are re-presented as tropical locations that are inherently damaging to the Creole (white) female body and psyche, and also to that body’s claim of ‘whiteness’ and ‘Englishness’. The novel represents the damage to all four as caused by the proximity of the ‘white’ body to the ‘black’ and the ‘mixing’ of the ‘races’.
Leprosy looms large as a ‘terrible scourge’ in the novel as it did in 19th-century colonial history at the time. Around the time of the novel’s publication, there was a contentious debate as to whether the increase in leprosy cases in the colony and the colonial world was a threat that required compulsory segregation of lepers.
The annual colonial report for the Leeward Islands for 1891 made sure to clarify that there were few cases of the diseases in Antigua, citing a census that returned a figure of forty-five cases in a population of 36,119.
Meanwhile, in Cassin’s With Silent Tread, leprosy, a ‘terrible scourge’, operates predominantly, as O’Callaghan summarises, as a “trope for the hidden shame of miscegenation, and more generally, for the contagious sickness of West Indian post-slavery society.”
