Ronald Firbank: Prancing Nigger, aka Sorrow in Sunlight (1924)

The original title of Roland Firbank's short 1924 novel, Prancing Nigger, has today been politically corrected to Sorrow in Sunlight. Partly written in Havana, this book – written by a person with much obvious affection for black people – contains a great deal of conversation, mostly that of the kind we would normally expect to find in fiction about the slave plantations. The narrative is equally colourful: there are not only references to exotic flora and fauna, but the language itself is strange and exotic:

'One evening, towards sundown, just as the city lifts its awnings, and the deserted streets start seething with delight, [Charlie] left his home to enjoy the grateful air. It had been a day of singular oppressiveness, and, not expecting much of the vesperal breezes, he had borrowed his mother's small Pompadour fan.'

This book is not set in the US but on an unnamed Caribbean island, where a family – Mrs Mouth and her husband (whom she calls 'Prancing Nigger') and their children Miami (or Mimi), Charlie and Edna. Mrs Mouth has decided that they are to move from the small village of Mediavilla to the city of Cuna-Cuna, where her children can be educated, where the family can 'enter Society': yes, it's a form of social improvement, where they will be wearing dresses, shirts and trousers instead of leaves and loincloths.

So they move to the bright lights but university isn't ready for the children, although (passing through an earthquake and a religious revival) two of them find an unplanned future: the younger Edna starts living in style with Madame Diaz's son (although probably not for long), whereas Charlie is 'fast going to pieces, having joined the Promenade of a notorious Bar with its bright particular galaxy of boys.'

Firbank's writing is delightfully odd, even when he occasionally seems to be slightly mis-translating from an unknown foreign language.