The Rainmaker’s Mistake (review)

“If who know, nah talk, you haffi work it out child. You just haffi work it out” (59). Erna Brodber’s fourth work of fiction attempts to “work out” the question of present day black diasporic identity. The text offers readers a challenge that, in form and content, is simultaneously novel and not novel. In general, Brodber’s writings consider the importance of the past in shaping the present and the future of blacks in the Caribbean and North America. Her new offering turns to fantasy, fairy tale, folk tale, and myth to creatively imagine a past for the New World present. It focuses more closely than her previous works (both fiction and non-fiction) on historical links between various populations of the African Brodber fans will first recognize the characteristic Errol Lloyd cover, with its layered and suggestive images that, like the text it bounds, can reveal new meanings upon successive viewings. The textual layers are evident in the beginning as readers encounter what seems to be an omniscient narrator only to find they have been “listening” to Queenie’s recounting of the creation myth/mystery that drives the novel. Queenie, whose interest in education and social science corresponds to Brodber’s other fictional heroines, carries most of the narration, but she is joined by other “I”—s six others, in fact—who, like Queenie, search for answers to their present with questions about their past.

The Rainmaker’s Mistake begins in an unspecified time and place. Mr. Charlie, landowner, looks out on his “patent” and decides he needs labor. He plants his seed in the earth, raises yams from this planting, and cultivates these brown yams into brown people who are “young and old, big and small, male and female, brothers and sisters, children of one father dug from an everlasting underground source” (2). After Mr. Charlie’s planting is revealed as an oft-told tale within a tale, readers are introduced to the Eden-like existence of the people who believe they were once brown yams.

Each time readers feel as though they have grasped the direction of Brodber’s storyline, or deciphered some meaningful historical or contemporary connection, a new voice or idea enters the narrative, unbalancing any appearance of stable metaphorical correlations. For example, early in the text Mr. Charlie announces from his verandah, “It is 1834: You are under six years old and you are free” (10). This first concrete evidence of time is comforting and the reference to freedom indicates that the “brown yams” are slaves on Mr. Charlie’s patent of land. The previous mentions of labor, naming, missing women, and new babies begin to fall into place as evidence of life on a plantation. With this clue, readers can now settle in with the innovative metaphor, reveling in the conflicts created by impending freedom and the appearance of a yellow yam baby, Sallywater, who has unusually soft and straight hair.

But in the very next paragraph, Mr. Charlie reappears to announce, “It is 1838 . . . you are free” (11). Thus, just as it is offered to the reader, the gift of chronological certainty is revoked. But the reference to these specific years still indicates that the story is set in a West Indian British colony and that the relationship between Mr. Charlie and his “children” is one of master and slaves. However, as Queenie grapples with this idea of freedom “And what was this he was saying: ‘You are free’ and behaving so strangely because of this thing called ‘free’” (11)—one of her brothers, Woodville, laughs Mr. Charlie’s house off its base. The house disappears into the sky, leaving the former slaves (though this word is never used) to fend for themselves in a changing landscape. And readers are once again left with as much foundation as Mr. Charlie’s house.

The ensuing neglect of the land causes the rivers to run and separate the land into three continents: Woodville on one, Sallywater and her “caretaker” I-Sis on another, and the rest in the middle. These...