New Day by Victor Stafford Reid

First published: 1949

Type of work: Historical chronicle

Time of work: 1865-1944

Locale: Jamaica

Principal Characters:

• David (Davie) Campbell, a participant in the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion
• Pa John Campbell, his father, a near-white farmer and estate headman
• Johnny Campbell, the narrator of the novel and Davie’s brother
• Lucille Dubois, Davie’s fiancee and later his wife
• John Creary Campbell, Davie and Lucille’s son
• Garth Campbell, Davie’s grandson, a lawyer and businessman, union and political organizer, and leader of the modern self-government movement

The Novel

New Day opens in 1944 on the eve of the granting of a new constitution, one of the last steps on the road to Jamaican political independence. One of the Jamaican leaders at the time is Garth Campbell, and the event prompts his eighty-seven-year-old great-uncle, Johnny Campbell, to think back to 1865 and his family’s participation in the colony’s frequently violent political development.

The first and longest of the novel’s three sections deals with the events of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion. Although some historical figures appear in the novel, events and characters, including the fictitious Campbell, have been molded to suit the novelist’s purpose. The novel’s action is related in the first person by the dialect-speaking narrator Johnny Campbell, who as a child of eight is caught up in the maelstrom of events which, over the course of a few weeks, lead to the killing of his father and the transformation of his brother David (Davie) Campbell into a young man fleeing for his life from the colonial authorities.

The extreme suffering of the Jamaican peasantry has been brought on by a three-year drought and the disruption, because of civil war in America, of traditional food supplies; it has been exacerbated by the greed of the white planters, who exploited the situation in order to obtain cheaper labor, and the colonial governor, who answered desperate pleas for help with disdain and a show of force.

The near-white and relatively secure Campbell family is split over how the present crisis should be solved. The stern patriarch, Pa John Campbell, violently disagrees with his blond-haired son Davie over the latter’s joining a group led by the radical Baptist deacon Paul Bogle, whom Pa John’s Church of England pastor describes as “a black Satan in human form . . . preaching sedition against the most gracious person of our Queen!”

The inevitable confrontation between the angry peasants and the established authority is bungled by both sides, and the result is that hundreds are slaughtered, mass executions are ordered by drumhead tribunals, and what representative government existed is abolished. Davie Campbell, along with his youngest brother, Johnny, and intended bride, Lucille Dubois, flees Jamaica for a small cay off the coast.

The second section of the novel deals with the period 1866 to 1882. Under a grant of immunity from prosecution, Davie, as one of the few left alive of those who marched with Bogle, addresses the Royal Commission inquiring into the Rebellion and puts the case for the rebels so eloquently and forcefully that the public audience declares, “Is the man for the glory, this!” Davie knows that Bogle’s uprising has resulted in even less freedom than before but looks forward to “a new day” when representative government will return to the island, and laws for the poor will not be made by buckras (whites) but by the poor themselves.

With Lucille, Johnny, and a small band of workers, Davie returns to his cay, which he calls Salt Savannah after his childhood home, and gradually establishes a thriving community. His dedication to hard work and austere living becomes obsessive and life-denying; he becomes a religious zealot, refers to his cay as Zion, and attempts to shield his people from outside influences. Just as Davie and his community seem headed for crisis, he loses his life in a hurricane, and his unhappy wife disappears for several years, leaving the r infant son, John Creary Campbell, to be reared by the narrator and his friend Timothy M’Laren. In one of the novel’s many unlikely coincidences, Lucille is located by the narrator working in a brothel only to die the following day in the great Kingston fire of 1882.

In the last section of the novel, prosperity weakens the remaining community on the cay and the earthquake of 1907 finishes it off. John Creary Campbell, a bland but successful businessman, marries a haughty Englishwoman, and they produce Garth, in whom the narrator sees the unmistakable mark of Davie, the boy’s grandfather. Garth’s parents are conveniently carried off by the smallpox epidemic of 1920 and, like his father, the boy is left in the care of the narrator, Johnny Campbell, and his friend Timothy, both old bachelors who steep him in the lore of his land and his family’s history before seeing him off to Cambridge and subsequent law studies at Gray’s Inn.

Having been prepared by nature and nurture, Garth returns to Jamaica and becomes a successful lawyer, capitalist, and, with his cousin Carlos Fernandez, union and political organizer. Like his grandfather Davie, Garth addresses a Royal Commission, and with the blessing of British Socialists Garth launches his own labor party. The novel ends as it began, with old Johnny Campbell awaiting the ceremony which will grant the new constitution and the dawn of a new day.

The Characters

In the first chapter of New Day, the action flashes back to 1865 and the presentation of Pa John Campbell, a third-generation landowner and headman on the estate of the near-white public figure George William Gordon (a man actually executed as a result of the 1865 Rebellion and an officially named national hero of modern Jamaica). Pa John is of Afro-Scottish background, and the narrator observes, “All our family have got daylight under their skins and hair like English flax.” Because the family appears to be white, the members must be careful to demonstrate that they are not “playing like buckra,” and in fact they do usually identify themselves with their black compatriots.

Pa John is physically powerful, a skilled hunter and a natural leader who shuns public office in favor of minding his own business and working hard to support his family. At home he is a Bible-quoting authoritarian and in public a member of the established church and a respecter of the constituted authority. His stubborn faith in British justice and the belief that righteousness will protect him from scandal and persecution lead to his destruction.

Davie Campbell is the novel’s most fully realized character and beloved of the narrator, his youngest brother, Johnny. Contrary to his father, Pa John, Davie is impulsive and willing to contemplate violence to achieve political and economic change; too late he recognizes that his people need more preparation and better leaders than the vengeful Paul Bogle. One of the novel’s set pieces is the long, impressive but unlikely speech in which the nineteen-year-old Davie gives his account and analysis of the Rebellion before the Royal Commission. Much more convincing is Davie’s own reversion to the religious authoritarianism of his father and the gradual atrophying of his warmer human qualities.

The novel’s narrator, Johnny Campbell, has a powerful sense of his family and its destiny; his life is dominated by a love and admiration for his brother Davie. As a character, he is most interesting in the novel’s first section, where he is most directly involved in the central action. He presents himself as a mischievous but brave child and as the voice of experience, wisdom, and historical perspective in his old age. He was said to have been born with the gift of foreknowledge, and he consciously sets out to guarantee that Garth (whom he calls “Son-Son”) takes over “from where [his] rapscallion of a brother Davie left off,” but without Davie’s mistakes.

The three generations of Campbells (including the financially successful but uninteresting John Creary Campbell) presented in the novel prior to the appearance of Garth are clearly meant to have their best qualities united in him, and consequently his character often seems more the result of the author’s wish-fulfillment than of credible human development. The problem is further complicated, and the novel weakened, by the obvious association of two competing political figures of the author’s own time (Norman Manley and his cousin Alexander Bustamante) with the fictional characters of Garth and his cousin Carlos Fernandez. Because the differences between the men are never dramatized, the novel’s closing pages often read like gratuitously partisan propaganda, thus detracting from the loftier aims set out in the author’s note.

Lucille Dubois, the white-appearing descendant of privileged Haitians who nevertheless sided with Toussaint L’Ouverture, is a friend and supporter of Paul Bogle and obviously the perfect mate for Davie; when she begins to reveal a more complex psychology and independent personality, however, she is removed from center stage, and any potentially decisive role she might have had is assumed by the bachelors Johnny Campbell and his friend Timothy. New Day is about men; wives, lovers, mothers, and sisters are treated as necessary inconveniences to be disposed of as quickly as possible or simply to be relegated to the periphery of the action.

Critical Context

New Day is an ambitious first novel in which Reid sought to create a national consciousness and to show a continuity in Jamaican history and public life which had not been expressed in literature before. The novel is also innovative in its attempt to use a West Indian dialect in both narration and dialogue. As already noted, this use of dialect is not always under control; in addition, the dialect at times disappears entirely as the narrator faithfully but incongruously reports long passages of standard English dialogue. New Day was one of the first novels of the West Indian literary renaissance, and in the use of West Indian dialect forms Reid experimented with techniques that were soon to be exploited by other Caribbean writers, most notably Samuel Selvon.

Reid has published The Leopard (1958), a novel which also explores the colonial experience and is set in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising. He has published novels for children, including Sixty-five (1960), which deals with some of the same historical events as New Day but is more conventional and, within its restricted aim, sometimes more successful.

Despite having revealed his partisan political bias in New Day, Reid makes clear that what he is advocating is a generous and humane approach to Jamaican political development and social reconciliation. It is indeed unfortunate that external and internal pressures have combined to prevent most of the hopes he expressed for Jamaica in 1949 from becoming a reality in the subsequent decades.

Bibliography

Gilkes, Michael. The West Indian Novel, 1981.

James, Louis, ed. The Islands in Between: Essays on West Indian Literature, 1968.

Moore, Gerald. The Chosen Tongue: English Writing in the Tropical World, 1970.

Ramchand, Kenneth. An Introduction to the Study of West Indian Literature, 1976.