Augustown: A Novel

“For here it is, the small panic of the heart, the widening of the eyes, the ‘O’ of the mouth. O! O! O! The past!”

The image of Ma Taffy’s “heart” connected with the past foreshadows the later “failure” of her heart during the autoclaps. This imagistic connection further establishes Ma Taffy as a bridge between the past and the present and creates tension as the narrative moves forward.

“The stone that poor people like us born with, Irene. Is a stone that sit right on top of our heads. The one that always stop we from rising.”

The “stone” is an important symbol of the oppression of the Black people of Jamaica by Babylon. Only Bedward was able to remove his stone, and eventually, Gina’s stone falls off after her death. The idea of weight keeping Black people from flying echoes throughout the novel, with allusions to images associated with slavery that kept former enslaved people rooted to the ground, like overly salty food and chains.

“When the past takes hold of us, it does not let go easily. We find ourselves, miraculously, in two places at once. And because Ma Taffy is blind, it is easier for her to shut out much of the world around her.”

The image of existing in two places at once fully solidifies Ma Taffy’s role as a bridge between past and present. She can exist in 1920 and in 1982, which gives her the unique ability to predict much of the tragedy of the autoclaps. It also hearkens back to the narrator’s claim that each day contains all of history, and Ma Taffy can move through time due to that fact.

“But in her heart, Ma Taffy knew it was more than enough to die for. She knew that for people to be people, they had to believe in something. They had to believe that something was worth believing in. And they had to carry that thing in their hearts and guard it, for once you believed in something, in anything at all, Babylon would try its damnedest to find out what that thing was, and they would try to take it from you.”

Ma Taffy meditates on the importance of faith after Clarky’s suicide, ultimately reflecting on The Role of Myth, Folklore, and Religion in Sustaining Community and Identity. The religion of Rastafari is important enough for people like Clarky to build their identities around. As soon as Babylon sees the hope Rastafari offers, it seeks to destroy it.

“Such young people lived their youth never thinking about the inevitability of their own death. That was a special kind of luxury, and it was one which she knew Soft-Paw would never have, so she was silent.”

The Consequences of Racial and Social Oppression appear in Ma Taffy’s assessment of Soft-Paw’s mindset. Soft-Paw directly fights against Babylon, who seeks to destroy him and everything he stands for. Unlike people his age who do not face racial oppression and racist violence, he knows he could die at any time due to his resistance to the dangerous power structures that cause harm to him and his community.

“Many hours later, he keeps on saying this in his head, The nerve! The nerve! working himself up into a frenzy, pretending that the misdemeanour wasn’t in fact as small and common as it in fact was.”

In utilizing repeated exclamation points, Miller demonstrates the feverish inner mind of Mr. Saint-Josephs. The use of the word “frenzy” also provides insight into Mr. Saint-Josephs’s instability, or as it is later referred to, his “unravelling.”

“But perhaps the specific wound that Mary left on him is in fact a sense of himself: a self he does not care to know but which he most certainly is.”

This allusion to the “wound” appears later in the first chapter of Part 2. To know Mr. Saint-Josephs, it is necessary to know what his wound is: He knows, deep down, that his self-view is flawed. The result of the racist oppression Mr. Saint-Josephs sees in society is a deeply rooted self-hatred that stems from internalized racism.

“O righteous and downtrodden people—you have nothing to fraid for. A low-born blackman is going to rise up over Babylon. So tell me now…oonoo ready?”

This quotation from the character of Bedward demonstrates Miller’s use of vernacular dialogue. Bedward’s patois reflects the cultural dialect spoken by Black Jamaicans, making the characters feel authentic in the historical narrative. This dialogue also foreshadows Gina’s later flight over Babylon.

“‘Then again,’ she continues, ‘is probably just the everyday story of this goddamn island—just another striving man that this blasted country decide to pull down.’”

This dialogue ends Ma Taffy’s telling of the story of Bedward, demonstrating that Bedward is not a cautionary myth but instead another man “pulled down” by Babylon. Ma Taffy summarizes the history of Bedwardism and Rastafari versus Babylon in just one sentence.

“Look, this isn’t magic realism. This is not another story about superstitious island people and their primitive beliefs. No. You don’t get off that easy. This is a story about people as real as you are, and as real as I once was before I became a bodiless thing floating up here in the sky. You may as well stop to consider a more urgent question; not whether you believe in this story or not, but whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in.”

This metatextual quotation demonstrates Miller using the voice of the narrator to refer to the audience and comment on the novel itself. It also issues a challenge to the audience, encouraging them to pay close attention to the historical elements of the story informed by both concrete real people (including. Bedward, Garvey, and Probyn) and by a character sketch of the Augustown community.

“To know a man properly, you must know the shape of his hurt—the specific wound around which his person has been formed like a scab.”

The return of the wound imagery this time describes Bongo Moody and his grief at the loss of Clarky, a grief that reverberates out through the rest of the Rasta community, especially in Gina and Ma Taffy. It also demonstrates the way that Miller builds his characters. Every character in Augustown has a wound of some sort that informs their understanding of the world.

“A thick, grey thing which was nonetheless invisible. The thing poured out of the man, and everyone in the market could feel it against their skin and in the lining of their nostrils.”

The imagery of “the lining of their nostrils” connects the scene of Clarky’s beating by the police to Bedward’s flight and the autoclaps. The sensory detail of smell is integral to this connection, as the smell of ripe jackfruit is symbolic of the oppression of Babylon. When Clarky returns from jail after the violent removal of his hair, the grey ooze still accompanies him, like how the smell of jackfruit accompanies Kaia when he meets a similar fate.

“For which of the Rastamen in front of him has not been persecuted in the same way Clarky was, or at least known someone who has been? Which one of them does not know a similar story, maybe of a Rastaman riding on his bicycle, of batons knocking him off and into the road where he bruises his body; of police searching his pockets for ganja seeds and leaves; of being thrown into jail, of having these Babylonian officers hold his head tight in the grip of their fat arms and having his locks cut off?”

Bongo Moody’s inner dialogue demonstrates the longevity of The Consequences of Racial and Social Oppression. The widespread nature of Babylon’s violence illuminates the severity of the racism the Rastas face. Despite their close-knit community, the violence continues, starting with the violence against Bedward and culminating in the violence against Kaia six decades later. The protracted sentence structure creates a frenetic tone that further illustrates the gravity of the problem.

“Life, of course, is often shaped by such things—the word that is not only said, but that lingers; the sentence that is not only spoken, but pronounced—these syllables that stick in the air until everyone feels their stickiness, these syllables that grow out from a mere utterance into something tangible, like the woman who turns to her husband one morning and says, ‘It’s over,’ or the field slave who whispers to the stalk of cane he is about to cut a simple word: ‘freedom.’”

These lines directly connect the march of the bobo shantis with the allusions made to slavery in the novel. Like the enslaved people of Jamaica who fought for their freedom, the bobo shantis now march for the safety of their religious and cultural practices and way of life.

“What then of the ears of snakes, or wood frogs, or mice, or bugs? Do they not count? What then of grass, of stone, of earth? Does their witness not matter? If a man flies in Jamaica, and only the poor will admit to seeing it, has he still flown?”

The idea of classism appears in these lines. Babylon worked to erase the truth of Bedward’s flight, discrediting the witness statements of the poor due to their lower socioeconomic status. This quote also demonstrates Miller’s exploration of the intersection of classism and racism, as the discredited voices of Augustown are also primarily Black.

“The skyline is now a crowd of black wires stretched between evenly spaced poles. It is the poles which look most peculiar to Sister Gilzene—like a line of crucifixion crosses, Calvary repeating and repeating itself along every road.”

The religious imagery of the electricity wires Sister Gilzene sees outside her window contrasts her view of the relationship between past and present with Ma Taffy’s view. Both women are the only characters in the narrative alive for 1920 and 1982, but Sister Gilzene has her visual sight, and her understanding of the world around her is informed by her religious views and her ability to physically see. Ma Taffy can be rooted in two times at once due to her blindness, but Sister Gilzene is firmly in the present.

“What else is an autoclaps but that moment when the heart fails—that moment, coming soon, when Ma Taffy will run from her verandah and into the street, will fall to her knees wanting to shout, Stop! Stop! Stop! But her heart! Her useless, useless heart, like a stifling sponge in her mouth.”

Ma Taffy’s heart appears again, this time foreshadowing her heartache over the loss of Gina at the climax of the autoclaps. Miller’s poetic background appears on the page, as the image of “a stifling sponge in her mouth” is both lyrical and full of consonance.

“What irony, this sudden panic of being watched, this feeling that the affluent community in which he finds himself is somehow threatened by this other person he has been observing all along—a lone woman, perhaps, who, in looking up, must feel the unfair weight of all that privilege rising above her.”

This vague reference to a lone woman is foreshadowing Gina’s rise or flight and her relationship with Matthew Garrick. She is the one who looks up at Beverly Hills and fully understands the weight of the privilege she does not have access to.

“Already he was falling into the silence he would never escape from, which is not to say that he became mute. Rather, he was folding himself into himself. He was learning how to become withdrawn and surly. He was learning how to be defeated. And once learnt, it was a lesson Kaia would find impossible to unlearn.”

The Consequences of Racial and Social Oppression make themselves clear thematically in these sentences. The consequences of the violence against Kaia are not just the loss of his hair and Rasta identity but the loss of the vibrancy of his soul.

“It was just Ma Taffy’s pragmatic understanding of the world. She was a poor woman raising poor children in a poor place. What more hope could she have for them but that they survive? Every morning she hoped that they would be so blessed as to avoid bullets and knives and the various schemes of Babylon.”

The image of the bullets of Babylon foreshadows Gina’s death. The repetition of the word “poor” also emphasizes the consequences of the oppression of Babylon as Ma Taffy cannot escape her socioeconomic circumstances due to Babylon’s continued tyranny towards the entire Augustown community.

“It is beginning to spread inside her veins, this floating feeling, as if she could close her eyes right now and begin to rise, up, up, up into the air.”

This is the clearest foreshadowing of Gina’s flight. The floating feeling here is the hope for a better future, an education, and a way forward, but the cruelty of the juxtaposition with her real floating fate demonstrates the omnipresence of Babylon’s oppression.

“Gina and Mr. Saint-Josephs, lost for a moment in their own histories. The past, when it takes hold of us, does not let go easily.”

Like Ma Taffy, Gina and Mr. Saint-Josephs exist in two places at once: their respective pasts and the convergent present moment. The impact of the role of their histories cannot be understated in this moment as their pasts push them into reactionary actions and continue the tragedy of the autoclaps.

“She thinks, Yes. I am Mommy. Your own mommy who will never let nobody trouble you. My name is Gina Elizabeth McDonald. Miss G to others. I am the bright gyal from the ghetto who going to rise out of this shit hole. Yes, Kaia. We going to rise out of here. She thinks, I am the Dispenser and the Watchman; I am the Shepherd and the Trumpeter. I am the flying woman.”

In these lines, Gina fulfills Bedward’s prophecy. Like he was the Prophet, she now takes on the mantle of other biblical nicknames, such as the Shepherd. It is also the climax of Gina’s character arc and her reclamation of her identity in the face of Babylon’s most violent form of oppression, which further demonstrates the strength of her character and her importance to the community.