One Brown Girl and 1/4

Thomas MacDermot

• Publisher: Mint Editions
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781513223490
• eBook ISBN: 9781513223490
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

One Brown Girl and ¼ (1909) is a novel by Thomas MacDermot. Published under his pseudonym Tom Redcam by the All Jamaica Library, One Brown Girl and ¼ is a tragic story of race and class set in Jamaica. Understated and ironic, the novel critiques the social conditions of Jamaica under British colonialism. Through the character of Liberta Passley, a wealthy woman of mixed racial heritage, MacDermot sheds light on the disparities between the island's black and white communities, crafting a story now recognized as essential to modern Caribbean literature. "'I?' said Liberta Passley, 'am the most unhappy woman in Kingston.' She was not speaking aloud, but was silently building up with unspoken words a tabernacle for her thoughts. She considered now the very positive assertion in which she had housed this thought, went again through its very brief and enigmatic terms, and then deliberately added the further words: 'and in Jamaica.'" Despite her beauty, wealth, education, and social standing, Liberta Passley is unable to feel satisfied. Raised as the only surviving daughter of a wealthy Englishman and his formerly-enslaved wife, Liberta feels she must ignore her mother's side of the family as a means of rejecting her African roots. Manipulating her father, she arranges for her Aunt Henrietta, her mother's only surviving sister and their loyal housekeeper, to be fired and thrown out. Thinking she is making a decision for her own good, she unwittingly welcomes disaster into her life. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Thomas MacDermot's One Brown Girl and ¼ is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• The “Unusual” Preface
• I. Liberta Passley and some of her ways and meanings. Old Peter as owned by Liberta—His rebellious hair and clothes—What Liberta wrote on her tablets—The arithmetic of humanity—Mrs. Cariton’s understanding of it.—Whence Liberta’s name came—Liberta No. I—The Doctor’s Dictum—“The Princess” and Waiting Time—“Hell in a House”—How Aunt Henrietta’s “Kingdom” fell.
• II. Enter some other people, Ada Smith and a casual Harold—“The Unfair Treatment of some Jamaicans”—Captain Burn’s words and Liberta’s thoughts—Liberta’s “disease”—The Reader who did not comprehend—And the Listener who did—Ada explains why—Noel as Referee.
• III. Mrs. Gyrton and the afflictions of some other Mudfish—The Father who was Resurrected—Theories of Taxes—The Prince of Wales and the Secret of Raphael White—Governors and Collectors—“Coughing up Taxes”—Marriage and Money—Mr. Grant’s Proposal and His Views on a Wife.
• IV. The Slaying and Eating of the Last Fowl—The Pouring Forth of Debate—Into Theological Mazes—Prayer—The Devil and the Carpenter—A Final Surprize.
• V. Between the jaws of the Meffalas—Fidelia, the Coromantee—The smiting of John Meffala on the mouth—The Sot at Midnight—The Order of the supple-jack—The tragic work-seeker—Through wine to truth—A misinterpreted meeting.
• VI. Pic-nicking on the Mountain-tops—And on the Plain—Dragons of the Past—In the Tropical Moonlight—The Reader and her Audience of one—Miss Vera and her Story.
• VII. The Letter addressed by a Lady—Harold Entertains Ada—The Beauty and Her Beast—“I do Love You”—Two Interpretations—When One Receives and Gives a Shock.
• VIII. When a Young Woman Knows Her Own Mind—And a Young Man Does Not—The Figure Beside The Carnations—Ada Meets a Colonial Secretary.
• IX. A Duel: Harold vs. Noel—Love, Creator and Creature—Responsibilities—What Percival Road Held in the Starlight—The Cross Roads’ Pause in Life—What Noel Remembered: and What She Forgot—Calling a Beautiful Body to the Bar of Judgment.
• X. Human Fingerposts Up and Down—The Sinner by the Wayside—“God’s Best Dog” smells Sin—Into the Silence—After Church With Meffala and Ada—A Minute in Oblivion.
• XI. When Bachelors are Merry—High Jinks, Musical and Otherwise—Something That “Stank Of Lawley”—George announces an Interruption, and a Lady—What Harold Expected on one side of a Door—And What He Found on The Other Side.
• XII. In Which Everything Depends On Noel—When One Decides By Refusing To Decide—The Way Harold Did It—The Way Noel Did It.
• XIII. The Yielding Of Weakness—Ada in Noel’s Room—Phantoms and Realities Today on The Hills—Tomorrow on the Plains.
• XIV. Tells The Beginning of a Soul Hunt—The Trail Of a Woman’s Soul—Noel Follows It—The Last Step On Life’s Staircase—Liberia Tries to Pick The Meffala Lock—How Cariton Unconsciously Did Something Important—The Major Sees Behind the White Sepulchre of Decency.
• XV. Tells How The Major Handled Meffala, Junior—And Continues a Hunt—With Digressions.
• XVI. In Which we Leave the Soul Hunters—And Study the Soul At Close Quarters—Under Coralilla Bowers —A Crisis, via A Bad Coin Plays an Important Part—Ada’s Theological Convictions—Cold Water In a Glass and Elsewhere—An Attempted Deal in Gold Bangles—Peeping In at the Cottage Window—And after.
• XVII. Gleaning in the Wake of The Hunt—Liberta’s Review and Foreview for Ada’s Benefit—The Major’s Counter-view Unexpressed—Rumours True And Untrue—Meffala Returns to Oblivion—And We Leave The Major at a Black Moment.
• A Note About the Author
• A Note from the Publisher