This, Book First of the trilogy that is Philippine, captures the lives of the "Children of the Sun" of Jeanette, Free Negro Woman of Grenada, and her French husband Honoré Philip. In it, Gérard Besson places the various members of the Philip family sharply etched against the historical backdrop of the Revolutionary Atlantic, when the people of the Western World began to strain against the shackles of monarchy and servitude and the revolutions of France and South and North America, including Haiti and Grenada, uprooted the social order.
We explore the lives and characters of each of Jeanette and Honoré's children based on whichever historical evidence we have-e.g. for Judith, there is an abundance of record that demonstrates her success as a planter and business woman, as opposed to Nicolas-Régis, where all we have is his will and wove a story around him with fiction and leaving the rest to the reader's imagination. Two other sons, Joachim and Honoré fils, gave their lives in the Fedon revolution; both were convicted and hanged for their principles in their attempt of an armed fight for the rights of the Free Blacks and People of Colour.
Philippine demonstrates how a mixed-race, slave-owning family was able to navigate those turbulent times so successfully, especially as it regards the upward mobility of the mulatto woman: all three daughters of Jeanette's marry white men, but the sons marry black or coloured women.
For the interested reader, the historical documents were placed on Gérard Besson's blog "Caribbean History Archives".
About the Author:
Born in 1942, Gérard A. Besson is an independent researcher and scholar in the area of History of Trinidad and Tobago. His oeuvre comprises many titles, both non-fiction and historical novels as well as works about folklore. Besson is the recipient of the Hummingbird Medal Gold of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago and of an honorary doctorate of the University of the West Indies. He is the founder and chairman of Paria Publishing Company Limited.
Other works by Gérard A. Besson:
Fiction:
Tales of the Paria Main Road (Creative Advertising 1973); A Diary of Dreams (Paria Publishing 1988); The Voice in the Govi (Paria Publishing 2011); From the Gates of Aksum (Paria Publishing 2013); Roume de St. Laurent ... A Memoir (Paria Publishing 2016); Philippine Vols 1 and 2 (Paria Publishing 2024).
Non-Fiction:
A Photograph Album of Trinidad at the Turn of the 19th Century (Paria Publishing 1985 and 2024); From Colonial to Republic (Republic Bank, with Selwyn Ryan 1987); Folklore and Legends of Trinidad and Tobago (Paria Publishing 1991); The Book of Trinidad (Paria Publishing, with Bridget Brereton 1991 and 2010); The Angostura Story (Paria Publishing 2000); The Angostura Historical Digest (Paria Publishing 2002); Scotiabank - The First 50 Years (Paria Publishing 2004); The History of Ansa McAL in the Caribbean (Paria Publishing 2006); The Cult of the Will (Paria Publishing 2010)
ISBN: 978-976-8244-51-2
466 pages
Paperback
Available on Amazon
From the Booklaunch
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From the book launch: Paria Publishing's Dominic Besson, Alice Besson holding a picture of Gérard Besson, and Prof. Bridget Brereton (Photo courtesy Paper Based Bookshop) |
The "Philippine" trilogy was launched on 22 November, 2024, at Paper Based Bookshop's "Tea and Readings" event at the Chancellor Hotel, St. Ann's.
Speaking on behalf of Paria Publishing were Prof. Emerita Bridget Brereton, who delivered remarks about the book; the author's son Dominic Besson, who read a passage from Book First; and the author's wife Alice Besson, who spoke about the making of the novels and why they had been dedicated to Peter Redhead and Bridget Brereton.
Dominic Besson's excerpt from Philippine Book First - "Children of the Sun"
“Madame, they come to kill we!” shouted Yewande. She was hurling her weight and all her strength against the kitchen door while attempting to put the bar in place as a clattering crash filled the house with dust. “Madame, they coming in the roof. Shoot them! Shoot!” she screamed as the door was flung open and she was hurled aside. Yewande had never seen such an ugly man. His hair so red, his carbuncled face inflamed, his size so huge.
The man caught her by the neck and would have snapped it like a twig if she hadn’t plunged a carving fork into his face, which gave her a moment to get out of his grip. From the back room she heard an explosion and could smell the powder.
“Where is the food?”
“Look for gold. There must be gold somewhere.”
“She shot Beamer!”
Héloïse Dugué had defended herself against bandits before. She had held renegade blacks at bay and, at another time, faced down obnoxious French officers. She slept with a brace of loaded pistols within reach and a primed blunderbuss alongside her brass bed. They hadn’t taken her by surprise, she had been waiting for them for years.
“Take the door down, Francis!”
But Yewande wasn’t through with the giant and she stabbed him again with the carving fork, this time in the back. Francis Spriggs felt that he could not to get away from this old woman who barred his way, a carving fork in one hand and a machete in the other, and lashed out with his fist. The blow sent Yewande sprawling to the floor of the kitchen, but not before striking her head on the edge of the iron stove.
“Take the damn door down, Francis!”
Turning about, the man raised a huge boot and took the door off its hinges, only to face Héloïse Dugué sitting up in bed, levelling her highly polished brass blunderbuss.
“Va te faire enculer! T’as pas de couilles!”
These were the last words that Francis Spriggs heard.
As they ran into the night with what they had found in the bedroom, the storeroom and on the iron stove, the house ablaze behind them, they never noticed the young girl hiding in the cachot-brûlent, a look of terror frozen on her face.
Captain Ned Low did not discover Héloïse Dugué’s cache of gold coins. These, in small leather bags, were concealed within the magnificent magenta knots of an embroidered Venezuelan hammock, a parting gift from a Canary Island windjammer captain. Gaining the steep incline above Gran Mal Bay, the men were disgusted to discover that the iron box, small, square and heavy, which Low had snatched from Héloïse Dugué’s bedroom, was filled with donkey-eye seeds, jumbie beads and pretty shells. Delight, however, replaced disgust when the dawn’s morning light revealed a sail upon the horizon. It was making directly for Gran Mal Bay. Waiting and watching until the schooner’s crew had come ashore they swam out, boarded her, murdered the watch and, hoisting her jet black sail, they made for Nassau, where in the months ahead Captain Ned Low, ever a notorious figure amongst the Brethren of the Coast, would be laid low by the hand of the notorious Charles Vane, captain of the Ranger.
On a Sunday afternoon some days after her mother Yewande’s and Héloïse Dugué’s murder, the girl Jeannette went alone to say a final adieu to her mother’s Vodun, as the spirit was called in the language of the Fon people. She had earlier retrieved, from their barrack room, her mother’s only possession: the small, black clay jar that she called a govi. Then, running to the burnt-out house, she carried away the silken magenta knots taken from the charred hammock.
The evening’s warm air carried the sad smells of damp coal pot smoke and excrement from the compound’s latrines, familiar and pathetic, to blow about her as she stood in the shady hollow of the plantation’s cemetery. It was where Yewande was buried near to her owner. Jeannette, the magenta knots containing the little leather bags slung from her shoulder, knew that she was being watched. She feigned distress, as though grieving for her mother and her mistress and waited for their interest to wane as she knelt at the graveside in the gathering dusk before starting to dig, surreptitiously, deep into the soft earth into which she placed the knots that contained the little leather bags of Louis d’or.
She imagined that she was placing the little bags of gold coins into her mother’s hands. She thought of them as her mother’s wages for her labour and in a more obscure way in payment for her life. The maintenance of the small clay jar, she understood, was now her responsibility. She had an idea of sorts that it held not just the guardian spirits of her mother and her grandmother, but also their fetishes, the small personal objects and little lucky charms that served, in the ancient tradition of the Fon people, to retrieve the best of their past so as to gain a favourable future, even after death."
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