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Black Dumas
Sunday, 17 October 2010 00:00
To say that Alexandre Dumas was mixed race is an understatement; he was mixed everything. His grandfather was a white aristocrat who bought a plantation on the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and married a black slave called Marie-Césette Dumas.
In 1786 their black son joined the French army as a common soldier. Within seven years he was a distinguished general, single-handedly holding a bridge against the Austrians and commanding the French cavalry under Napoleon in the Egyptian campaign. On his return General Dumas was captured by the Kingdom of Naples, then at war with France, imprisoned for two years, tortured and poisoned. By the time he came home to his wife Marie-Louise, the white innkeeper’s daughter in a small village in north-east France, he was broken in health though capable enough to father a son, Alexandre, author of The Three Musketeers.
Mixed? You’re not kidding.
Super-Tramp
Wednesday, 01 April 2009 22:22
Just over a hundred years ago George Bernard Shaw received a small parcel through the post. It contained a self-published volume of poems by a man who gave his address as a doss house for single men in Kennington, London. But Shaw only had to read three lines to know they had been written by a true poet. He met the man, introduced him to literary London society and encouraged him to write his adventures.
W. H. Davies’ The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, published in April 1908, has seldom been out of print since, and with good reason. Its colourful tales of bums’ conventions and riding on top of freight cars drunk continue to delight, and it will endure because it is written from a point of view that is almost unique.
Nearly all eye-witness accounts of life among society’s outcasts have been by literary outsiders who descend into the underworld in order to look like a hero, as when Jack London lives among the urban poor in The People of the Abyss or travels as a hobo in The Road. By contrast W. H. Davies was a tramp on both sides of the Atlantic for twelve years rather than weeks, and most of that time he was motivated by nothing nobler than an aversion to work. Yet whether he is telling you of the time he was shaken awake by an earthquake while sleeping out, or the despair of his final days when he lost the will to beg though his life depended on it, his story has the tension and suspense of a man whose life and soul is in jeopardy.
Across the Atlantic By Freighter
Thursday, 12 February 2009 22:10
The first thing is I nearly miss the boat. I take a train from Philadelphia down to Chester, thinking I will get a taxi to the ship from there. No way. The black homeless people who inhabit the station tell me this is not a town where taxis feel safe. They won’t come here supposing you phone them.
I talk to a bus-driver who says he goes near the port. At least I think that’s what he says but I’m Scottish and he can barely understand me. He drops me off at a petrol station in the middle of an industrial wasteland and I wheel my suitcase up an unpaved road, the only one I can see. I come to a Pentecostal church – dilapidated and lonesome-looking on the margins of an ominously silent housing project. Beyond that, thank goodness, is a big sign. Penn Terminals.
“You the passenger?” the security men ask at the gates. That’s the first I know I’m the only one.
Freighter ships routinely carry six or so passengers each trip – older adventurous types who have done the luxury cruise holiday and are looking for something more offbeat and challenging. But clearly brave souls like that draw the line at crossing the north Atlantic in winter. The Chief Mate eyes me over like he hopes I know what I’m letting myself in for and shows me to my cabin.