Minty Alley by C. L. R. James

First published: 1936

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: Late 1920’s and early 1930’s

Locale: A barrack yard in Trinidad

Principal Characters:

• Haynes, the protagonist, a twenty-year-old educated middle-class black man
• Mrs. Rouse, a devout Catholic landlady who also believes in “obeah”
• Benoit, the live-in partner of Mrs. Rouse for eighteen years; he plays the role of the highly sexed and irresistible lover of 2 Minty Alley
• Nurse Jackson, a thin and very light-skinned woman of mixed blood in her late thirties who works as a private nurse to the rich town people, from whom she steals
• Maisie, Mrs. Rouse’s very pretty but rebellious seventeen-year-old niece
• Philomen, Mrs. Rouse’s honest, energetic, and hardworking Indian servant

The Novel

Minty Alley is the story of Haynes, a young black educated middle-class man who observes and becomes involved in the daily life of the “ordinary people” of 2 Minty Alley, a barrack yard in Trinidad. Life in the yard is presented from the perspective of Haynes, who is himself transformed in the process of observing and participating in that life.

Beset by financial problems and wanting to escape his sheltered, “monotonous,” and “empty” life, Haynes decides, after the death of his overprotective mother, to take up lodging among the working people at 2 Minty Alley. Encouraged by the affable landlady, Mrs. Rouse, he ignores his servant’s advice about not living among those who are “not [his] class of people.” Shortly thereafter, he begins to regret his decision, until a crack in a board in his room affords him the opportunity to play the voyeur and eavesdrop on the sexual activities of the inhabitants of the yard. Changing his mind, he decides to stay so he can witness the “terrific human drama” unfolding at 2 Minty Alley.

Haynes’s observer status is quickly changed into one of participant as he becomes increasingly involved in the lives of the yard occupants. In fact, everyone begins to confide in him, and he is forced to use all of his skills and resources to keep the peace among them. Even though from time to time he announces that he will leave, something always comes up to prolong his stay. Consequently, he is drawn into every conflict.

His involvement begins when the son of Nurse Jackson runs into Haynes’s room to escape his mother’s brutal beating. Haynes intercedes on behalf of the child and fails. The precedent of going to seek his help has already been set. Subsequently, Haynes is drawn into a romantic sexual triangle involving Mrs. Rouse, Nurse Jackson, and Benoit. Mrs. Rouse asks Haynes to speak to Benoit, assuming that Benoit “will respect what you say” since “you are a gentlemen and you have education.” Shortly thereafter, Benoit too confides in Haynes, placing him in an awkward position of having divided loyalties.

Haynes’s involvement grows even deeper when Benoit deserts Mrs. Rouse and marries Nurse Jackson, effectively curtailing his assistance to Mrs. Rouse. These tasks are taken over by Haynes, who looks after her business so diligently that she comes to admit that he is “of far more help to her than Benoit had ever been in his life.” By this time, he is already considered as “one of the family,” “one of them,” sharing in their “joys and troubles.”

Haynes’s involvement reaches its apex when he establishes an intimate relationship with Maisie, Mrs. Rouse’s seventeen-year-old niece, who takes on the task of his social education. She removes his timidity toward women and his employer. He becomes more self-confident and self-assertive. Maisie herself has to acknowledge that “when you first come here you couldn’t say boo to a goose.” The relationship between these two, representing two different social classes, is not destined to last. Maisie, unable to tolerate Mrs. Rouse and unwilling to go along with the social expectations of her role, ultimately leaves on a ship bound for the United States. Thereafter, the end of Haynes’s class experiment is in sight, since “he knew that without Maisie No. 2 was no place for him.”

The end comes quickly, in a succession of events. Benoit dies, Mrs. Rouse makes arrangements to sell the house, and Haynes, having sent for Ella, his servant, retreats to his dull middle-class existence. Even 2 Minty Alley seems to lose its working-class character as it is occupied by a nuclear family, one of whose members can be seen “sitting at the piano playing a familiar tune from Henry’s music book.”

The Characters

Like most of the other characters in the novel, Haynes is presented as a type. He is a reflection of the educated black middle class, alienated from the masses but seeking to bridge the gap through involvement in their lives.

This involvement has the effect of transforming Haynes and allowing him to develop. He arrives at 2 Minty Alley shy, naïve, and a little timid. By the time he leaves, his experiences, particularly with Maisie, have turned him into an assertive and world-wise gentleman. Even though Haynes returns to his middle-class existence, readers are left with the impression that life will never be quite the same for him. He has tasted the joys of friendship, and his sexuality has been awakened.

Haynes’s credibility as a character is open to question. In the Trinidadian society of the 1930’s it is a bit far-fetched to imagine him as a member of the middle class electing to live among and become involved in the lives of the people of a barrack yard. All the same, the author, himself a member of the black middle class at the time, claimed to have lived in a household similar to the one described in the novel.

However plausible Haynes’s character may be, it is clear that he is used primarily as a device for looking at the lives of the “ordinary” people of the yard. It is from Haynes’s limited perspective that the other characters and their activities are presented. Characters are seen only through his eyes; they have no independent existence outside what Haynes observes or is told. The author begins with the device of placing Haynes in Minty Alley as a voyeur, that is to say as an observer “peeping” in. He quickly abandons this and makes Haynes a participant, so that the members of the working class can be presented with greater accuracy.

It is to Haynes’s, or rather the author’s, credit that most of the members of the Minty Alley household, although types, are very human. They are living people. Mrs. Rouse, in her predicament involving Benoit and Nurse Jackson, is not difficult to imagine. The strong, enduring black woman is a very familiar figure. So too is the womanizing Benoit, who loses out in the end.

Maisie’s credibility as a character is maintained by having her not become romantically involved with Haynes. Theirs is primarily a sexual relationship, one from which she walks away without so much as a backward glance. “Me, Mr. Haynes. You’ll never forget me? You must not say such things.” It appears that Philomen, Mrs. Rouse’s Indian servant, is there for the purpose of raising racial questions. Her devotion, her loyalty, and her obsequiousness are a bit overdone.

Because the inhabitants of 2 Minty Alley are seen through the eyes of Haynes, himself belonging to a different class, they tend to appear one-dimensional. They undergo very little, if any, development throughout the novel. This is more a case of character revelation.

Critical Context

C. L. R. James, who has written volumes on areas as varied as history, political thought, sociology, cricket, literature, and philosophy, refers to Minty Alley as coming from a “prentice hand” in his masterpiece on cricket and other subjects, Beyond a Boundary (1963). For all this, Minty Alley, the only novel written by James and the first of the Caribbean novels written in English to be published in England, is pivotal to the development of the West Indian novel.

Although the novel was published in 1936, it was actually written nine years earlier, before the author had left Trinidad for England in 1932. The novel is a product of the emerging literary movement that the author, together with Alfred H. Mendes, another middle-class Trinidadian writer, intended to stimulate as a way of creating a nucleus for a genuine native literature.

James, in particular, had shown interest in the literary possibilities of barrack-yard life and had in fact written a short story, “Triumph,” that dealt explicitly and for the first time with the urban life and experiences of a Trinidad barrack yard where ordinary people live. “Triumph” is similar to Minty Alley in plot; it is obvious that the short story forms the basis for this novel.

In its focus on the harsh surroundings of the yard, the social activities of the people, the violence, the use of “obeah,” and the dialect of the inhabitants, Minty Alley signaled the birth of the Caribbean novel of social realism. In this respect, it foreshadowed the outpouring of talent in the literary movement of the 1950’s.

If it was a stroke of boldness and rebelliousness to use the ordinary people of the yard as a fitting subject for his novel, it was even more daring to bring the middle class, in the person of Haynes, to live among the yard people and to involve him in their affairs to the point that they can claim him as “one of the family,” “one of us.” It must also have offended and shocked the defenders of middle-class propriety to have one of their educated members conduct a sexual relationship with the “lower-class” Maisie, who educates him.

In that sense, the novel had serious social and political implications, even though James, on rereading Minty Alley after its republication in 1971, claimed not to have been aware initially of the implications. “I saw,” he says, “embedded in the novel a fundamental antagonism in West Indian society between the educated black and the mass of plebeians. . . . When I wrote it down fifty years ago I did not have one iota of feeling that I was posing a social or political situation.” It may be somewhat difficult to accept this, coming from one of the twentieth century’s most astute political theorists, one who has devoted many pages to analyzing the shortcomings of the Caribbean middle class in its dealing with the ordinary working people. Whatever its implications, Minty Alley is an important milestone in the historical development of Caribbean literature written in English.

Bibliography

Birbalsingh, Frank. “The Literary Achievement of C. L. R. James.” In Passion and Exile: Essays in Caribbean Literature. London: Hansib Publishing, 1988. Minty Alley makes a significant contribution to the development of a literary tradition in the anglophone Caribbean. It is one of the first novels to examine important social, cultural, and political issues in the region.

Buhle, Paul. C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary. London: Verso, 1988. An intellectual biography, this study by James’s editorial collaborator of long standing draws upon extensive interviews with critics and supporters and many previously unpublished documents. It is a penetrating portrait of the man and his times. Includes James’s views on a variety of subjects, from Caribbean literature to pan-Africanism to Marxism to Third World politics. Emphasizes James’s understanding and use of ideas.

Gilkes, Michael. “C. L. R. James (b. 1901): Minty Alley (1936).” In The West Indian Novel. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Minty Alley is intended to be a sympathetic exam-ination of “yard” life of the “despised folk,” seen from a middle-class perspective. It also explores the potential for cooperation, and the benefits thereof, between the middle class and the working masses.

Paris, D. Elliott. “Minty Alley: C. L. R. James, His Life and Work.” Urgent Tasks 12 (Summer, 1981): 77-98. Holds the view that Minty Alley is a forerunner to the later Caribbean literary movement. Notes that James’s sympathy is with the working people. This critique draws out the political implications behind the novel.

Sander, Reinhard W. “C. L. R. James.” In The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen-Thirties. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Minty Alley’s primary achievement lies in its detailed presentation of the life of the working people and in its preoccupation with the coming together of the middle class and the working class.