Beryl Gilroy

previous next

Author Profiles

Children Books

Nippers and Little Nippers Readers,
1972-1974
Green and Gold (four volumes) 1976
In for a Penny, 1978
Carnival of Dreams, 1980

Adult Novels

Frangipani House. London: Heinemann, 1986
Boy Sandwich. London: Heinemann, 1989
Love in Bondage, Stedman and Joanna- dedicated love in the eighteenth century. London: 1991
Black Teacher, 1976
Sunlight on Sweet Water, Peepal Tree,1994.
In Praise of Love and Children. Peepal Tree
Press: 1996
Gather the Faces. Peepal Tree Press: 1996
Inkle and Yarico. Leeds: Peepal Tree
Press: 1996

At a Glance

Beryl Gilroy is a female Black British novelist whose fictional concerns make her an important figure. She holds a reputation as one of the first black teachers in England, starting a teaching career in 1953 (she also gained her advanced diploma in child development in 1953), taking a break in the early 1960's when she becomes a mother, returning in 1965 to become the first black headmistress in Britain in 1969. She gained her teacher's certificate in 1945. Gilroy has very strong educational attainments acquiring a bachelor of science in psychology in 1956, and specialization in ethno-psychology through both her 1979 masters degree and her 1987 PhD degree. Her works, aside of novels and children's stories, include her autobiographical work, Black Teacher, published in 1976. Its reprint in 1991 highlighted the relevancy of her work on the British school system to modern day Britain.

In Britain her extensive experiences include her work with immigrant children, multicultural education as well as remedial education and helping children with birth defects. Gilroy has published a book of her own criticisms, Leaves in the Wind (1998), where she provides a reading of each of her novels in terms of her intentions. Through her exposure to teaching and childhood education, she has been encouraged to write school texts. Her reasons were to "kill of Eurocentric books foisted upon the children in order to set their places in the slurry at the base of the pyramid of achievement."(153) Her desire to establish herself and her remembrances as " a good teacher and as a person who wrote books that made children identify with themselves as they are," (61) has led to educational publications bound to the conviction that "suitable texts can heal and educate emotions." (25) Gilroy has recorded over a dozen school texts for children between the ages of 5-15, they all precede her adult novels. Some of her more popular children's texts include Nippers and Little Nippers, 1970-5, In For a Penny and Carnival of Dreams, 1971, Bubu's Street, My Dad, New Bed, Arthur Small and New Shoes, all 1972, The Present, Rice and Peas, No More Pets and Outings for All, all in 1973, Knock at Mrs Herbs, The New People, The Paper Bags and Visitor from Home in 1974.

Of crucial importance is the detachment that Gilroy feels to the contemporary realities of her prior West Indian home in Guyana. Having lived the majority of her adult life in Britain since 1951, Gilroy feels her attachment is to her new home in Britain. She states: "Caribbean writers in Britain have to deal when writing about the Caribbean with a retrospective and increasingly unrepresentative view of reality of the places they call home."(56). For Gilroy " as they years passed my awareness of the issues became located in the new environment in Britain." (56) Also of deep importance is her desire to "write authentically about a time I lived."(23) She has boldly declared the purpose of her fiction for young people, and wants her readers to see the importance of her work as part and parcel of her desire to use her fiction to teach and educate from reality. Gilroy sees her work as attempting "a blend of reality, always returning to Britain which is to me now home."(30). She is at pains to represent reality in her works and she has termed her brand of fiction "fact fiction."

One of Gilroy's concerns as a Black British novelist is to document the European cruelty of the planter class towards the slave. The novel Stedman and Joanna deals with the Dutch raids through the Surinamese interior. Though the novel is narrated in the first person style of a white Dutch soldier, Gilroy builds in a host of narrative voices affording the reader a rich catalogue of the hardships that the slaves endured during the slavery era. Through dialogue with the first person voice John Gabriel Stedman, Gilroy allows the planters to tell their own stories. In doing this, Gilroy is able to build a weighted critique of the plantation society. Gilroy also does this through the condemnation that her first person voice has against the cruelties of slavery and the crimes practiced against the black person in Surinam. Stedman witnesses "the most unbelievable and ingenuous form of cruelty" as an African girl is tied naked and whipped because she refuses to submit to the physical abuse by her white tormentors." He recounts the cruelty of two plantation owners - Mr Ebber who flogs a boy because he appeared ugly to him and Mr Blunderman, Mr Ebber's successor, who practices such cruelties that he drives the slaves to serious murderous recourses. This leads Stedman to comment, "This system produced dangerous people on both sides and caused dreadful pressures to come between people and their humanity." Slaves fall prey to diseases due to malnourishment and women and children are forced to submit to "Flagellations and live burnings." Injury is common "Throughout the colony one legged and one armed men were common. Legs were lost for running away from persecution and hands for raising them against whites.

The strength of Gilroy's presentation resides however in the use of dialogue which imbues the text with multiple narrative voices. All build the case of the planter class's cruelty the slaves. We are given a first hand account from the confessions of the planters and due to their acquaintances with the narrator. In Surinam, Stedman meets a gaming friend Valm Helm whose cruelty is marked. He is vicious and violent abusing his slaves calling one a "black swine," he threatens to kick the slave "open like a rotten calabash." Stedman comments on the unabashed cruelty of the planter "Valm Helm had shown me fully the power of the planter class over those at his mercy." He is shocked to find this " naked harshness and blind degradation of the human heart." At Miss Goatzee's plantation he witnesses her cruelty to a black female girl Yetee who is beaten and chained. A sport is started on her plantation commonly allowing the mules to fight and this affords Yetee the opportunity of try to commit suicide. As she cries out for water, Mrs Goatzee replies "Let her die for her pride." Miss Spaas' house radiates with the greatest crudities causing another De Graav to comment on her wickedness.

There is a public whipping of a young ten year-old boy David Douglas who is to receive a hundred lashes for opposing someone who tries to abuse his mother. Stedman captures a bloodthirsty audience whose desire for violence is fully satiated by the wails of pain appearance of "mangled mass of blood red flesh." Someone comments "How disappointing the child did not survive for " It is so amusing to see them rise up with the blood a pattern of ribbons upon them." We hear sadly of another slave at this scene - Jupiter who is tortured by the mob and mocked by the watchers from 6.30 to 11.00 in a "barbarous execution." There are other incidents of cruelty played out when Stedman remarries Adriana Weirts on his returns to Holland. He has left his slave wife, Joanna, and he hears in Holland that she is dead. Stedman is grieved immensely by her passing,it was entirely Joanna's decision not to accompany him to Holland because of her desire to allow their son to grow up among his culture and relatives. However Stedman's son Johnny relocates to live with his father. Adriana is very cruel to Johnny and Johnny confesses that she has a deep hatred for him believing "She would like me frequently whipped and she "spurns my mother as a slave." Gilroy presents the reader with Adiana's cruelty through her own words. She abuses Johnny both physically and emotionally, causing Stedman to say that his wife is devoid of the milk of human kindness."

Finally Gilroy attempts to destroy much of the set notions of the white purist thinkers. Stedman dispels much of these stereotypes by directly refuting them based on his observations. He treats the popular racist opinions at the time. He reflects on the reason blacks are tortured realizing the " punishment of slaves was extreme because it was thought that they felt less pain." Stedman's slave boy Quaco can spell and recite letters, which proves he is not stupid. Stedman reflects, "At this time there was muck talk as to whether Africans were human at all. Souls and the ability to think and reason were not attributed to them although many were capable craftsmen of immense abilities often confounding such low beliefs about them." Stedman attests to the great wisdom of the blacks. He owes his life to one of the African soldiers, Camaraca, a member of the Winti cult. He in not only knowledgeable about his environment, but Stedman manages to stay alive and well on his advice. When he is sick, he sends Quaco and for Dara the Indian woman whose cures aid in his recovery. Stedman sees wisdom in the reason for the rebels outlasting the Surinamese soldiers in the interior. " The colonel took more notice of his men than of the Africans but they died less. I sought the reason for this and found that Africans when thrown together without interference with their natural thought need not be told to "love their neighbor as themselves." They shared even a single egg with one or several others while our men shouted "I have only one: it is for me alone." We see the cruelty of the white towards the white in the actions of the Commander in Chief Fourgeoud who is known to be "avaricious oppressive committed and indefatigable." He lets his troops eat "raw beef and raw pork ' while he cooks his food and his decisions to raid the interior with sick troops is accountable for the deaths of many of their forces. In the end he can boast of minor accomplishments and their is a level of satire employed in his summation of their victorious stance "We have destroyed twenty one towns or villages, demolished two fields with vegetables of every kind burned innumerable huts and to date our spies have told us that the rebels have fled to Cayenne." The expedition is a wasteful exercise involving an unnecessary loss of life as the rebels elude them for the whole novel.

As a female black British novelist, Gilroy demonstrates her dedication to rewriting the wrongs imposed on the black man by correcting the ills of historical misrepresentation. She does this moreover because of the maintained prejudices held against the third generation British Black person, which are directly due to history's teachings. By revisiting history, Gilroy reworks the canvas of these journals emphasizing the strengths in the black civilization, while detailing the injustices they were put through in the slavery era.