The Pirate’s Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson
It’s funny, isn’t it, how sometimes a book looks like one thing, and turns out to be another. This was one of my BEA books, as most I review are, and from the title, and the cover, I figured it was a Romance novel. Requisite beautiful woman, back to the camera, tropical setting …
And it is a novel, and set in a tropical place, but it isn’t a smarmy romance. And then it seems to be about Errol Flynn – whom I confess, I didn’t know a whole lot about before reading the book. But really it turns out to be most of all about Jamaica, and about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
Errol Flynn, the real-life movie star, was known not only for being handsome, but for his love of women, and of the ocean. A quick Google search brings up that no accurate count has ever been made of how many illegitimate children he had, and he was brought to court a couple times for paternity suits, even while he was married to one of his several different wives.
The main characters are a young girl, Ida, who falls in love with him on his visits to Jamaica, despite their age difference – he is a friend of her father’s, after all – and her mother’s urgings to find a “nice, Jamaican boy.” She knows she is beautiful, the daughter of a Lebanese father and a black jamaican mother. Her parents are not married, as her father’s first wife refuses to divorce him, and Ida is 12 before she realizes this. But Esme, her mother, is always, always aware that she is not REALLY “Missuz Joseph” and wants a better fate for her beautiful daughter.
The focus switches, and is told from the point of Ida’s daughter by Flynn, May. She grows up looking white but feeling proud of being Jamaican, and early on has to fight for her own place in the world when Ida goes of to America to work and send home money. Mother and daughter never really understand each other, but both struggle and thrive in the places they land.
Their relationships with each other and with others, are half the story of the book. The other half is a subtle portrait of Jamaica, from the mountain home of Ida’s grandmother Oni, to the city of Kingson, where Ida’s snobby half-sisters live. It is a love story for Jamaica – both from its native born children, and other immigrants and visitors, like Errol Flynn, aristocrats, treasure hunters and vacationers who fall in love with the troubled land.
I do so like when books teach me about little things without being pedantic. Ohateite apples are so special to Ida, and to May, and are mentioned so frequently that I had to Google them. (They’re more pear-shaped than apple-shaped and are tropical fruit native to the South Pacific.) Like these “apples” the books is lovely, a little sad, and not at all what it seems from the cover. And funny enough, afterwards I read that the authors lives near here, and teaches at Wellesley College – not a bit tropical!