From the Publisher
The inhabitants of Vieux Fort, a Caribbean town occupied by the Americans during World War II, were said to be waiting for the Americans’ return to bring back the good times. Five-year-old Henry whose father died when he was eighteen months old was still walking up to men asking, “Mister, are you my father?” His mother, Eunice, a strict Seventh Day Adventist with the gift of foretelling the future, would not be unequally yoked. Eugene, a stall keeper and the town’s most colorful and free-spirited character, was a woman living in a man’s body, and a man living in a woman’s world. Ruben, a favorite son, an intellectual, a famous cricketer and a staunch Roman Catholic, falls madly in love with Eunice. What happens in Vieux Fort when Henry teams up with Eugene and Ruben warms his way into the heart of Eunice is a tale of magic and tragedy.”
The writings of Dr. Reynolds, be it fiction or nonfiction, has been described as a world in which a great drama unfolds where history, geography, nature, culture, the supernatural, and socioeconomic and political factors all combine to seal the fate of its characters. In this crucible of a world, readers are provided with deep insights into where St. Lucians come from, who they are as a people, and how they became who they are. If so, then readers are in for a treat, because The Stall Keeper provides deep insights into the forces that have shaped Vieux Fort; it speaks to the very character of the town, and throws light on long unanswered questions about why Vieux Fort is the way it is.
The Voice
Here is a writer who is fast developing a reputation for being St. Lucia’s most important storyteller. Are you vague, ill-informed or lost about a period of your past that you wish you were better acquainted with? Or have you heard of significant events or personalities that influenced the lives and times of an earlier age that are now little known because it was felt that they had better been left alone? The latest novel by award-winning author of Death by Fire (2001) and The Struggle For Survival: an historical, political and socioeconomic perspective of St. Lucia (2003) offers some consolation in this regard.
It has been erroneously perceived that history is merely the juxtaposition of dry facts, events and dates. On the contrary, as the very name suggests, history is actually the story of the life of a people or civilization at a given point in its evolution.
So the author of the Stall Keeper has once again employed his old recipe of using tales that tantamount to a new approach at documenting and teaching history. Anderson Reynolds, the holder of a doctorate in Food and Resource Economics, has a knack for making the reading of his text all the more palatable by dousing the narrative with doses of adventure, conflict, love and humour.
Viewed from any angle, the Stall Keeper is a two-sided narrative: a dramatized history of the period and a love story that grew out of it, intertwined in the saucy tale of the stall keeper, a weird character whose portrayal is arguably (or meant to be) the centerpiece of the novel.
Set in the island of St. Lucia—the south to be exact—during the island’s emerging period of post colonialism in the 40’s to early 60’s, The Stall Keeper brings to life a period when living was difficult; when long and back-breaking hours of manual labour in the sugar fields or vegetable gardens was the order of the day; a time when people went about on horseback and donkey carts, and when only “a generation before, priests passing on horseback were known to horsewhip anyone who hadn’t greeted them with sufficient humility and subservience”; a time when darkness descended quickly on the rural villages, mandating early retirement for want of social activities.
But it was also the time when the Americans, on account of the Second World War, descended upon the island—Vieux Fort in the south in particular, as well as Gros Islet in the north—like a downpour and occasioned a sudden and turbulent change in the lives of residents.
The novel recalls with great vividness numerous aspects of the social and cultural norms and mores of the time. It is a nostalgic journey back to a time and place when the author was growing up, nothing short of a romantic preoccupation with the past.
Peter Lansiquot
CARICOM economist and diplomat
When I read Death by Fire (Dr. Reynolds first book) years ago, I knew that Saint Lucia had produced another writer of the calibre, or of even deeper essence than Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul, only that Anderson clearly did not suffer from the hang-ups and traumas of poor Naipaul, notwithstanding that Reynolds had grown up in similar poverty as Naipaul’s, or perhaps worse, but luckily had not faced the sociological demons that had brutalized Naipaul’s unusually fertile mind, a bruised product of the relatively more traumatized human settlements terrain of otherwise beautiful Trinidad & Tobago.
As an economist myself, my later gobbling-up of Dr. Reynolds second book, The Struggle For Survival: an historical, political, and socioeconomic perspective of St. Lucia, left me even more enthused with Dr. Reynolds acute literary panache, and it has always remained stuck in the remotest recesses of my mind how I almost shed a tear when I first observed and pondered upon the cover of that profoundly touching piece of Lucian literature. Even now, just watching that cover page and imagining the struggle for survival of our poor, wretched grandmothers, carrying those hundredweight baskets of coals upon their heads, for pennies per week, into the belly of that ship, threatens to rupture my tear glands. But soldiers aren’t supposed to cry! We are supposed to bravely embrace the struggle for survival and produce even more Nobel Laureates.
Then Jako Productions very graciously gave me the honour of introducing this amazing author to the audience on the night of his launching of The Stall Keeper, April 2, 2017, in his hometown of Vieux Fort, Saint Lucia. The attendance was very impressive, notwithstanding the relative isolation of the venue, the National Skills Development Centre, in a deep rincon of the sparse and dry Vieux Fort landscape.
I recall feeling somewhat embarrassed that evening, faced with the near unnerving task of introducing a son of the Vieux Fort soil, a real Vieux Fort homie if ever there was one, to an audience comprising mostly Vieux Fortians, further compounded by my status as a rather distant Castries (the capital of St. Lucia) homeboy. However, the experience doubtlessly represented the pinnacle of any pleasurable pant I may have had to date, in my entire life, in this terrestrial existence.
“The writing is exciting. When you pick up The Stall Keeper, you just can’t put it down. I read Death by Fire and The Struggle for Survival some years ago with fever in my heart and soul; I went through The Stall Keeper last month like a bubbling juvenile, eager for more and more vibes on the Vieux Fort existence. The character, Eugene, caught my imagination like a rat in a trap, and his father, “Big Man”, simply blew me away! Dr. Reynolds’ vivid descriptions of Big Man’s sad life – as he seeks desperately to deal with the pain and shame of his only son’s homosexual traits and related mannerisms – is a work of art”.
Let me take this opportunity to salute Dr. Reynolds as he tours the continents, while earnestly hoping that his notorious bashfulness does not in any way inhibit his reactions with the thousands of our relatively bold and beautiful St. Lucians in the Diaspora.
The Stall Keeper should be read by every Saint Lucian man, woman, child and professor of literature! This delectable bowl of hot, steaming Lucian bouillon, spiced up with canelles and calaloo, crafted by the by-far most humble, yet most articulately exciting Lucian craftsman of the written word I have met to date, takes Vieux Fort by the neck and shakes it vigorously, releasing into the breezy Iyanolan atmosphere all of Vieux Fort’s idiosyncrasies, its brutal picong, the madness and the gladness of the Yankee-era Vieux Fort, when miserable, poor, underemployed and semi-employed never-see-come-see peasants and townsfolk, who suddenly thought that they had money to burn, lit their cigarettes with US one dollar notes, pun intended!
This fine piece of work dissects, digs into, and displays our dignity, even in the face of our perennial poverty, yet exposes in harsh, tragic relief, the desperation and depravity of those Iyanolans disenfranchised by the gods and genetics, among them the next of kin of the unfortunate malmamans, a perennial Lucian dilemma, in a land notorious for its ferociously artistic and unkind anti-malmaman picong!
The Stall Keeper gave me an appreciation for Vieux Fort that I had not yet been exposed to in other pieces of St. Lucian literature. After reading the Stall Keeper, and digesting this image of Vieux Fort, I can now claim to be more complete as a Saint Lucian, with a larger embrace of things Saint Lucian, since the Vieux Fort piece had definitely been missing previously.
The Stall Keeper made me laugh, giggle, ponderous, sad and glad, all at once, and re-introduced to me the Anderson Reynolds whom I thought I already knew, just because I had already read, digested and assimilated his two previous masterpieces, Death by Fire, and The Struggle for Survival. How mistaken I was! Every Lucian must read The Stall Keeper, written by a man who makes me immensely proud to be Lucian!
Jacques Compton
Author of a troubled dream,
and The West Indians—Portrait of a People
This is a complex and ambitious novel set in the town of Vieux Fort in the south of the island of St. Lucia. The stall keeper is Eugene, an effeminate individual who sells fruits and an assortment of condiments from a tray by the roadside, an occupation which other personages in the novel consider to be the preserve of women.
The novel deals with history, poverty, politics, sports, education, jealousy, religion, superstition, and the effects which those have upon individual lives, in certain cases with tragic results.
The central personages in the novel are the widow, Eunice, her son, Henry, who is desperately seeking a father. Eunice is a fanatical Seventh Day Adventist, as such, discourages her son, who is fond of the game of cricket, to participate in such an activity for the game is played on Saturdays, the Adventist’s Sabbath, and from going to the cinema as well as attending parties; Ruben Ishmael, teacher, sports hero, who has fallen in love with Eunice, but that creates a problem when he asks for her hand in marriage. The problem and the conflict that confront Ruben who decides to join the Adventist Church is that the game of cricket is always played on Saturdays.
Superstition is rife in such a people, and many ascribe the downfalls of personages in the novel to the evils of obeah. Drunkards, beggars, prostitutes abound, and the author seems to suggest that the very nature of the society does not allow for any escape from such conditions to any meaningful degree, for the few who tried are destroyed by one force or another. Even more tragic is the arrival of the Americans during World War Two, for they contribute to the decay of morals in the town.
Eugene, the stall keeper and the fourth major character, progresses from selling from a tray to establishing a store, much to the delight of Eunice’s son, Henry, who envisages the expansion of the business, and dreams of one day working for and becoming the manager of one of Eunice’s stores, eventually opening his own store. But in the world of the novel where the forces of nature or evil or both invariably stack up against the people such dreams and aspirations are perilous indeed.
In this novel, the author invites us to take a hard, serious and critical look at the society, one which is wracked by illiteracy, ignorance, superstition, and which offers no way out of the dilemma that confronts the community in which the novel is set.
Mr. Garth St. Omer, St. Lucia’s first novelist, in his works, set in the same island colonial society, dramatizes the same constraints that allow no room for progress and development for the ambitious. Escape is the only route contemplated by his characters, but even that does not fully resolve the inherent problems.
The personages in the Stall Keeper have no thought of migration. The solution to the people’s problems, the author seems to suggest, lies within themselves, if they would find the strength, the imagination, the courage and the determination to do so.
Allan Weekes
Author of Talk of the Devil
In Anderson Reynolds’ novel, The Stall-Keeper, set in the 1950s in Vieux Fort, a town in the south of St. Lucia, a gifted young man, Reuben, encounters and falls in love with Eunice, an attractive if somewhat forbidding widow. This makes for engaging reading, for their love can only be consummated if one of them at least gives up entirely what is most dear to them—their entire life’s purpose.
At the beginning of the story, Reuben is the most outstanding sportsman in his hometown. Every Saturday on the sports field Reuben delights his hometown with his prowess at sports, either with his exquisite run-scoring stroke play on the cricket pitch or his deft footwork on the football field. Reuben is also considered a brilliant primary school teacher as well as a budding orator and politician. Reuben’s community is proud of him, seeing him as bringing glory to the reputation of their small town. Reuben is a young man fully integrated into his society and the mundane world.
Eunice, on the contrary, is a woman whose consciousness straddles two worlds. A woman who takes guidance for her life from her dreams and the voices that whisper to her from somewhere in her consciousness. These, for the most part, are quite benign, but Eunice is also prone to seeing quite mundane occurrences, as vegetables grown in her garden spoiling prematurely and the appearance of toads in the vicinity of her home as evidence of the malevolence of her neighbors and their desire to harm her in some way. However, Eunice was not always that way.
Eunice grew up attending a Roman Catholic school in a predominantly Catholic community and had expressed the intention of becoming a nun. She was encouraged by the Sisters who taught and guided her spiritual life, but all this changed when, in her early teens, Eunice, in the course of bathing and laundering in a river with her peers, encountered a young man with the darkest of complexion and flashing white teeth.
Allan Weekes: cultural activist, dramatist, author, literary critic, creative writing coach
Dreams and visions now guide Eunice’s new life. At this stage in her life story, Eunice is a young woman who has abandoned the Roman Catholic Faith in which she was born, was married at fifteen to the man literally of her dreams, the main catalyst to an instantaneous conversion to the Seventh Day Adventist Church. A fisherman, in his short lifetime, disappeared mysteriously at sea, leaving Eunice a widow, with a child, Henry, a boy who has developed the peculiar trait of walking up to male passersby and asking them if they are his father.
We see Eunice now a staunch Seventh-day Adventist, estranged for the most part from the community in which she lives, seeing it as riddled with pitfalls that will lead to damnation. After all, Saturday is a day that should be dedicated to a strict observance of the Sabbath. Henry, her son too, must be protected from the world of frivolous play and childish gossip. He must also be made to end his burgeoning friendship with Eugene, a deeply effeminate man, a hawker of fruits and vegetables in the company of women, and the Stall keeper of the novel’s title. However, in spite of Eunice’s admonishments and rumors of inappropriateness in the community about the relationship between Eugene and Henry, Henry maintains his friendship with the man whose peculiarities fascinate him and who will play a very salutary role in his development that the community of rumor mongers could never have foreseen.
Meanwhile, Reuben’s passionate love for Eunice and his conviction that bringing her into his life would complete him meet its own impediments. Her stipulation and that of the Adventist community to which she belongs that this can only be realized if he is converted to her faith is more of a challenge than Reuben foresaw. Come Saturday mornings, a choice has to be made between being on the sports field or in the Adventist Church, exulting in worship and plunged into Bible study. Faced with this dilemma, Reuben can undergo anything from paralysis to amnesia regardless of the fact that his happiness is at stake.
Eunice, too, suffers in patience. She, too, wants them to be together, but how long will the Adventist community wait for Eunice to bring him into the fold from which she cannot see herself departing? Fulfillment is slipping away from them.
The Stall Keeper deals with the themes of man as body and spirit, as individual and member of a community, and the search for self-actualization through the conflict these dualities pose. The novel demonstrates how failure to negotiate between these dualities can have tragic consequences.
