Reviewed according to Heather Hathaway Marquette University Kelvin Christopher James's first collection of short fiction.

Reviewed according to Heather Hathaway Marquette University

Kelvin Christopher James's first collection of short fiction, Jumping Ship and Other Stories, is a powerful, unsettling, and dramatic work which signals the arrival of a novel figure among an important arrange of literary artists whose writings span the Caribbean and the United States. Like his predecessors Claude McKay and Eric Walrond, and his contemporaries Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Michael Thelwell, and Derek Walcott, James himself is cross-cultural: He was born and educated in Trinidad, received his doctorate in Science Education from Columbia University, and now lives in Harlem. The stories comprising Jumping Ship are settle in both regions and carry in vivid and often alarming detail one as well as the other the beauty and pain of life upon either side of the Caribbean.

The collection is divided into three parts, each landed in a different geographical area. Part undivided consists of five stories plant in the islands (Trinidad itself is not ever identified as the specific location). Recalling the dialectical tension between an edenic fantasy and a far more foreboding reality that characterizes Herman Melville's Typee or "The Encantadas," all of the tales in Part common of Jumping Ship convey James's vision of a seemingly immanent peril lurking beneath the surface of a "tropical paradise." More precisely, all of the stories in Part the same probe the dangers of seduction. The first story, "littleness," for example, depicts the seduction of a young lad by nature. James draws his readers into the story, an apparent boyhood pastoral, with lush vegetative imagery as he describes the delight of the waking child, Nipi, on discovering that the king orange he has been judiciously lusting after has abundantly ripened and is ready for plucking:

He had followed its life from a tiny virid thing no bigger than a marble to its not past nor future gleaming ripeness, and for Nipi, the orange had grown from a private anticipation to an earned reward for patient instruction He had fed it worry and care; examine how just yesterday he had chanced it an extra day of ripening. Now yesterday's risk was a happy individual For in its yellow sheen, he could papal court the orange blushing that slightly pinkish tint that guaranteed special sweetness. (3-4)

As Nipi's inlet "gushe[s] full" with "'eager water'" at the notion of consuming his delectable morsel, James's narrator makes clear that this answer stems not simply from "raw greed" Rather, "the way the sweet considerations of the orange affected his entrance glands was more like magic, or something. Same as by what mode it sent private glances, possessive glances, at him each time the green leaf-curtain trembled" (4) These same forces of temptation, Obeah, and eroticism which underscore Nipi's attraction to the king orange repeatedly decoy other characters in Part undivided of Jumping Ship. Two other stories, "Succulence" and "Tripping," transfer the dangers of succumbing to the attraction of tropical illusions for the pair insiders and outsiders alike. In "Succulence" a garden heavy with lush fruit besufficient fors as an erotically ominous setting for an adolescent boy's sexual explorations, while in "Tripping," an Obeah ritual provides the opportunity to bare white tourists' fascination with island "exotica."

In all instances, however, seduction in Jumping Ship is followed from deprivation or betrayal. This can have dire issues For Nipi, for example, denial of the king orange eventuates first in his slaughter of a courting female kiskadee (a flycatcher indigenous to the islands), followed from a startlingly violent battle in which he flings a hatchet at his brother. James's description of the young boy's rage concerning being denied the object of his desire summarizes well the fundamental substance of "littleness":

Suddenly, the apparitions of a multitude of olden peeves coalesced in his mind to form a just cause. Nipi realized that he was constantly unsuitableed He was a little mouse in a world of fat cats. They kept him at their whims. They gave him no predilections He got the least nutriment the meanest chores, the greatest in quantity rules, and no privileges. None at all.(9)

Importantly, just as "littleness," as the first piece in the collection, stands as a harbinger of plenteous of what follows in Jumping Ship, this passage also provides insight into the motivations and frustrations of many of the male characters who appear in later stories.

To be steady Jumping Ship is a quintessentially masculine paragraph Revolving around the psychology and physicality of little striplings adolescents, young adults, and aged men James's collection explores in midst Black-male identity as it is invented in both the contemporary Caribbean and United States. Unfortunately, however, it does in the same manner at the expense of female characters. While men are portrayed as sophisticated and complicate women tend to be reduc to one-dimensional characters who almost uniformly be under the orders of as the cause behind a male character's downfall. Thus, somewhat ironically, while importantly challenging stereotype about men James reinforces those existing about women