The Girl With the Golden Shoes (17 page)

But is jealous they jealous like Joseph brothers. And one day, one day—it might take awhile, but is sure to come—a blight going take this island, and they going have to come to Seville. And they going see me and ain’t even know is me until I tell them. That is how much I going change.

“Mister, don’t mind,” she whispered to the rifleman beside her. She tapped his shoulder through the heavy wool. “Mister, don’t you mind.”

Without looking, he removed her hand and gently squeezed it with condolence. For her. For him. For history. For life.

“I’m sorry, miss,” he muttered.

His father and his brother laughed.

“Is okay,” she said. “Is awright.”
(Page 112)

Nobody does it better; at least nobody I know.

A few words concerning the themes of this fable. Without being reductive, it strikes me that there are three interwoven themes or conflicts being dramatized here. Moral conflicts, if you will, since this is after all a moral fable. They are dependence, trust, and betrayal. Because Estrella is a trusting soul (still a child, remember), and because she can’t escape being dependent—on men, on white people, on mixed race people, on people who possess the authority and power (and arms) of wealth and the law—she is betrayed over and over again. We see early on that she’s got to lose that trust; she’s got to become disillusioned. It’s the only way she can protect herself against being exploited by others. And so the narrative is at bottom an account of the long and arduous process of becoming disillusioned. It starts at home in an impoverished fishing village, where Estrella is betrayed by her own grandparents, on whom she depended and whom she trusted to keep and protect her, and ends in the capital city of Seville, where she finally is
somebody
, regardless of her station in life, because she can no longer be fooled. She says to the white man who has just offered her a job and a home:

“I ain’t want to wear you wife old shoes, Mr. Rawle. I walk too far from country for that. I need a ride to Salan’s. I need to buy my own.”

“I thought you didn’t have any money.”

“I lost it. But is
your
fault, so you going have to give me back fourteen pounds and fifty pence.” Then she remembered the money from Wilfredo, whom she thought of as Simón. “Plus twenty pounds on that.”

“That’s a lot.”

“That’s my point.”

“I don’t know if I have that.”

“If you ain’t have it, put me out.”
(Page 145)

Now that is no easily duped girl talking; not anymore. That is a woman to contend with.

Finally, it might be asked if we should add
The Girl with the Golden Shoes
to that short list of American classics I mentioned earlier,
The Old Man and the Sea, The Bear
, and so on. It’s unfair to compare it to those great and finally incomparable works, as this is the work of a relatively young writer still mapping the shape of his imagination, and consequently there is here and there the occasional stylistic tentativeness one associates with such a writer. Nonetheless, his standards for his book are set as high as those set by the American masters of an earlier generation, and that is how great literature gets made. Give thanks and praise, then. This man, Colin Channer, is clearly in the business of helping make great literature.