47 pages • 1 hour read
George LammingIn the Castle of My Skin
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
When school lets out early for both boys and girls, parents begin to worry. The all-girls school is told that fights are breaking out in the city and that it might spill into the villages. The villagers worry because they don’t have any official news as to what’s really happening. Moreover, they aren’t accustomed to dealing with the troubles that often arise in the city. Due to the tense atmosphere, shops remain closed and almost everyone goes home. Mr. Foster goes to the guardhouse to get information but returns with news that the guardhouse isn’t manned, meaning the village isn’t being protected by the police. This revelation confirms the villagers’ fears. Everyone rushes home and awaits the possible fighting.
Bob’s father and Mr. Foster go back and forth between their houses to ask for information or speculate on what’s happening. Meanwhile, Trumper and Bob slip out of Bob’s house and rush to the city. Pa comes out and angrily suggests that Mr. Foster and the others speak to Mr. Slime. “If the fight did spread to the village, Mr. Slime was the only man who could stop it. The villagers wouldn’t get involved against his will” (193). The men get angry at Pa, but he refuses to leave until they hear reason. Suddenly, an agitated Bob returns to the village, shouting, “They comin’, they comin’” (193). When he reaches his father, he passes out. Trumper soon returns too, and between the boys’ jumbled confessions, the villagers learn that they had reached the park when they saw the police attack a group of men. The boys ran after the men, who protected them from the police and gave them weapons. The boys joined the fight, but when the group fled, Bob and Trumper were separated. Bob followed the men into the city, where they were joined by a larger mob. There was blood and constant fighting in the streets. When the police began shooting, Bob fled to the police station and was brought back to the park. The police then told him to walk home from there.
Mr. Foster and Bob’s father speculate on the cause of the fighting and conclude that it’s on account of the strike that began the previous night. A large meeting had been held, attended by Mr. Slime and other higher-ups, and the workers threatened to fight like people had done in Trinidad. A drunk woman then comes into the village and reveals that her son, Po King, was killed by the city police. As the villagers comfort her, she explains how the crowds assembled early that morning with Mr. Slime and others. Soon, Mr. Slime and the bigshots left, and the fighting broke out. The city was vandalized but nothing was taken, and no one was killed initially. But the police soon began shooting, and Po King was caught in a tree and killed. Then the HMS Goliath fired on the town, sending the rioters fleeing toward the villages. As the landlord lives in Creighton’s Village, the rioters are most likely headed there. The woman’s words worry the villagers. They’re scared of the rioters and have absolute respect for the landlord, yet they can also understand the anger.
Soon, the villagers see small groups of men sneaking around their houses. Just as the woman predicted, the rioters have arrived and seem to be looking for someone. The villagers suspect that they’re looking for the overseer, but as more and more rioters arrive, they eventually see the landlord walking wearily along the road. Mr. Foster and Bob’s father can’t bear to see him harmed and so rush outside, but the rioters hold them back. Eventually, Mr. Slime arrives. His presence tempers the rioters’ anger, and the landlord is allowed to escape unharmed. Mr. Slime hopes their anger is satiated. He assures that “peace had been restored [in the city], and he warned that the police might soon move into the village” (208).
Chapter 10 Summary
Ma thinks about years past and how nothing has really changed. The riots have subsided, and the landlord remains in power in the village. Pa begins to talk in his sleep. Though Ma can’t make sense of what he says, instead of waking him, “she decided she wouldn’t interrupt. It would be better to let him get it off his mind” (209). Pa’s words flow together heatedly, and it seems he’s thinking about his life before he came to America as a slave. He talks about villages that believed in gods and one that didn’t, and how he understood life by looking at his surroundings and working the earth. His ruminations become more profound when he muses, “One question remain which we answer by quiet: wherefore was Africa and the wildness around it and the darkness above and beyond the big sea?” (210).
His thoughts then switch to “the silver of exchange” that changed many Africans’ lives (210). He and others were forced to journey the Middle Passage because of silver. Since slavery, Africans have been crippled by enmity for each other and displacement from their original homes. Despite the mistakes of the past, including the mistakes of conquistadors who “found” new lands and helped fuel the slave trade, present-day people like those in Creighton’s Village “must live like a god or a dog, or be a stone that is neither dead nor alive, a pool no wind will ever wrinkle” (211). Pa then mumbles something about death and life, which frightens Ma. She attempts to wake him, and though he stirs, he’s still half asleep. She tries waking him so forcefully, however, that she falls and hits her head with “a groan and a crash of the skull against the partition” (212). She dies. Pa finally wakes but can’t understand what just happened.
Chapter 11 Summary
Years have passed, and G. struggles with how much life is changing. “I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing things for the last time. It was like imagining the end of my life” (213). While searching for a pebble by the sea, he recalls how he found the pebble the previous day and grew attached to it. “Then I thought of the risk of losing it because it seemed to me that there were certain things that one couldn’t lose. Things which had grown on you could be risked since they had an uncanny way of returning” (215). As an exercise, he covered the pebble with leaves so that he could see if it would still be there. Now that he can’t find it, his fear of seeing things for the last time is confirmed. This fear conjures up other events that have recently taken place. G. recalls how his mother found him rereading a few letters. One letter was from Trumper, who finally left for America, and another was from a teaching post in Trinidad. The changes began when G. passed his public examinations and was admitted into the high school. His acceptance, however, meant that he’d spend less time with his friends. Even though G. tried to remain one of the boys, he knew—as did his friends and other villagers—that he was now different from them. As G.’s lessons progressed, he found that he didn’t have much in common with his old life. Soon, Barbados started hearing about the war in Europe. Then military drills began. When France fell to Germany, the village realized that Barbados, as a friend of England, was also in danger. Bob and Boy Blue were recruited by the local police force, while Trumper left for America. One day, a German submarine bombed a ship in the harbor, sending the village into an uproar. G. also recalls his time in high school. When his grades began to suffer, he was given a tutor. This tutor turned his life around and caused G. to want more. The end result was that G. applied to a teaching job in Trinidad and was hired. G.’s thinking about this change and Trumper’s exodus to America at the beginning of the chapter. Before the chapter closes, G. reminds himself of the prophetic last words in Trumper’s letter: “You don’t understand, you don’t understand what life is, but I’ll tell you when I come and I am coming soon” (227).
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
Barbados, and Creighton’s Village in particular, is confronted with major change in these chapters. From this point forward, change happens so rapidly that the villagers can’t cope with it. The changes symbolize the flood-like effect of politics, control, and systematic discrimination. Moreover, its reception underscores just how simply the villagers see themselves within the face of a complicated monster like change. Chapter 9, for instance, shows the results of Mr. Slime’s political maneuvering. After a workers’ strike breaks out, riots hit Barbados. Po King, a boy from Creighton’s Village, is killed. His death marks the death of innocence, both his as a young man and the village’s. The older villagers think they can perhaps shut themselves away from the violence by remaining inside their houses. The younger generation, like Po King, Trumper, and Boy Blue, flock to the unrest. This dichotomy between hiding and running into the fray marks a stark contrast between the generations. Symbolically, the younger generation represents the changing tide in knowledge acquisition. It’s Trumper and Boy Blue who gain knowledge of what’s happening in the riots by directly participating in them. Likewise, it will be Trumper and G. who learn about the wider world by leaving home later in the narrative. When Trumper mentions in Chapter 11 that G. doesn’t understand life at all, he’s critiquing G.’s worldview, one that is shaped by the village and its basic understanding of wrong and right. G., who has yet to leave home himself, admits that Trumper wrote to him
in a way that I hadn’t thought him capable of and which in fact I didn’t quite understand. He had been away three years and the new place had done something to him. The language was not unlike what he was used to speaking in the village, but the sentiments were so different. (227)
G. struggles with moving to Trinidad and the possibility of never seeing home again, while Mr. Foster (and other villagers) worry about the landlord’s fate when he comes face-to-face with a bloodthirsty mob. In an earlier chapter, Ma and Pa also worry about the landlord, and their worrying comes to fruition in these chapters when he barely escapes death by vigilante justice. Though the mob lets him live because Mr. Slime wills it so, his brush with death is indeed the proverbial last nail in the coffin. This is alluded to by Ma’s death. Ma represents the old ways of the village and all that is good in human nature. She trusts that a new day will come and that God will do as He sees fit. Her death heralds a new age in Creighton’s Village, one that will soon see the land sold, just as Ma prophesied. The change that is still to come is also alluded to in the dream Pa has right before Ma dies. He remembers the Middle Passage and how blacks were sold for silver, how even tribes sold their own people for silver and power. Pa speaks while dreaming and says, “If the islands be sick ’tis for no other reason than the ancient silver” (211). Riots, strikes, land grabs, war, and profiteering all affect Barbados, and it can all be traced to money changing hands.
