Crossing the River.

Caryl Phillips. Crossing the River. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1994. 237 pp. $22.00.

I find it interesting to speculate: Did Caryl Phillips start four separate novels, change his mind, and end up saving the best parts, finally bringing them together as this book? Some novelists do work in this perfectly honorable way. In any case, admirers of Caryl Phillips will be happy to know that he is still writing with a poet's sense of meter. His new novel, Crossing the River, is proof. In Crossing he also continues exploring his formal interest in the novel as something other than a thing with the usual sequential structure. In that sense, this work is akin to his book Higher Ground (1989), which was composed of three long stories dealing with the same legacy-of-slavery theme he sorts through again here.

In Crossing, as in his earlier work in general, fiction and essays, Phillips continues to demonstrate a broad vision through which he conjures up the historical past--especially the crime of slavery--for redress. He is passionately interested in probing the moral and ethical exchange and conflict between Africa, Europe, and the Americas over the issue of slavery. Uprooted characters in these settings have been his main preoccupation, and the ones in this book are no exception.

Crossing is a novel in the form of a collection of four long, more or less related stories. Two are from the points of view of white characters, two from black. Framing these four stories is a brief first-person narrative in the voice of an ancient African farmer, whose voice also closes the book.

The not-so-submerged subtext of Crossing is the idea that all black people in the diaspora have the same troubled common ancestral roots in Africa. This is not a point complex enough to make in itself. But wait. These ancestral roots are troubled--among many reasons--because many of those taken to the New World were sold by their forefathers to European slave traders. This is also not a new point. In any case, at the end, as at the beginning, an African farmer tells us that, in 1753, he sold his children--two boys, one girl--because his crops failed: "There are no paths in water. No signposts. There is no return." This, in effect, sums up the round-about point of the book: The diaspora is for keeps. The uprooted can't go back. And even if they could, who would know them, who would honor their return? (Since Richard Wright's Black Power, a book about his first trip to Africa, a growing number of black people of Europe and America, visiting Africa, have found not an African sell but their own Western identities reinforced.) To put it another way, the uprooted simply grow new roots, new troubled roots. And with courage, Phillips seems to imply, they survive, even in the face of the modern, corrosive, overt violence visited against them; or if overt violence is relatively absent, they endure despite the persistent institutionalized violent contempt for their very presence. Phillips' prescription for these ills seems to be staying itself. If one stays--and if one stays positive--long enough, his work implies, conditions will gradually change for the better.

In Crossing, the children that the farmer at the beginning sells are not the actual ones we encounter in the four stories, nor are they the direct descendants of those original slaves. We never meet those actual two boys and that actual one girl. Rather, three characters, two male and one female--Nash Williams, Martha Randolph, and Travis--whose lives we follow, are metaphors for them. (Travis's story really isn't his own; it belongs to a white woman. More about this later.) The fourth character is a slave ship captain, James Hamilton. We meet him through his journal entries and letters to his wife. And he is every bit as human, and as subject to suffering, as any of the others.

Their stories take place in vastly different times and places, and it requires an exceptional ability to suspend disbelief to see connective threads reaching across these vast stretches, despite the author's intention to create a massive, coherent and complex network of such threads.

Nash, a freed slave, is a Christian missionary during the 1830s in Liberia. In detailed letter after letter, he keeps his former master informed on his condition, which is not good due to the difficulties of living in such an underdeveloped country. While his health is failing, Nash constantly pleads for provisions. (Curious and aiming to help, the master eventually sets out for Liberia and reaches Africa only to embark upon his own descent into a hellish condition.)

Martha Randolph, an ex-slave in the Southern United States, is already an old woman when her story opens. She has never forgotten her daughter Eliza Mae and her husband, both long before sold to another slave holder. Last she heard, they were somewhere out west. After being freed from bondage, Martha leaves the South. Now free to travel after the Civil War, she heads for California. Attempting to put as much physical and psychological distance between herself and slavery as she possibly can, she manages to get only as far as Colorado, where she remains under the intense blue sky, tired and sick. Still she dreams of moving on, searching for her daughter and husband. Bitter and miserable, but free, Martha tells herself, no more washing and ironing for the white folks, "never again." Hers is a bitter, ironic victory.

Following Martha's story is the story of the British slave trader James Hamilton, whose journal dates from August, 1752. Hamilton keeps a record of the weather, the condition of his men, and the state of his own mind, as he provides leadership aboard the Duke of York. In his letters to his "beloved" wife, Hamilton pours--no, gushes--out his soul. His is a bitter hard life, which suggests that no one involved in the business of bondage, slave or enslaver, has it easy. It's breaking him physically and spiritually.

The final story is that of Joyce, a young white Englishwoman, who, after a bad marriage, falls in love with a black soldier, Travis, stationed near her village in Yorkshire during the second world war. Joyce's story might have been intended as Travis's, but it is difficult to imagine how that could be since it is Joyce's plight we are mainly focused on. Before Travis comes into the picture, Joyce works as a clerk in a shop. She's escaping Len, a brutal husband. Here is a woman who also has suffered the loss of her parents during the war and feels like an outcast.

Because the other stories deal with descendants of Africa (excepting the slave trader who dealt in Africans as commodities), one is almost tempted to discuss Travis as though he matched in presence Nash and Martha. Joyce's story starts in 1937 and runs to 1963, which means we are involved with her long before Travis arrives on the scene and after he leaves. He enters her life in 1943 and leaves it in 1945. Despite the occasional troublesome presence of her ex-husband, Joyce and Travis do make a brief life together, even dream of an unlikely future. Travis is transferred to Italy, but returns on New Year's Day, 1945, and marries Joyce just before the baby is born. Their son Greer--her "GI baby"--is given up to the County Council, but many years later, when she's a housewife with kids away at school, he comes back looking for her, just as she knew he would. The feeling a reader is left with is that black and white life brought together by war and other forms of greed--at least in most parts of western Europe, have been interwoven for centuries in this and similar ways.

Crossing is an interesting book, and the individual stories are outstanding; but, finally, for me, it is not, as a novel, formally quite up to a level with Phillips' The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), and Cambridge (1992). Yet the four stories do share two absolute things: Each has something to do with black people, and of course that is not enough of a basis. But more important than race, in a thematic sense, is their emphasis on pain. These characters, black and white, all suffer brutally and relentlessly. They are tragic and sad, but mainly hopeful. They are often courageous, too. They persevere.