I was asleep on the second floor of our narrow, gabled green house in Willemstad, on the island of Curaçao, the largest of the Dutch islands just off the coast of Venezuela. I remember that on that moonless night in February 1942, they attacked the big Lago oil refinery on Aruba, the sister island west of us.
The novel commences with the arrival of German submarines off the coast of Venezuela. It is still early in 1942, barely two months after the United States was pulled into the already-ongoing European conflict when Japanese planes launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. The narrator of this story is Philip Enright and he is not yet even into his teens at the time of the German assault upon the South American coast. With this opening narrative begins another entry into a time-honored sub-genre of fiction: the coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of war. War has a way of impacting people who may be thousands of miles from the closest battlefield and several novels of note use war in the distance as stimulus for a coming-of-age tale like The Cay.
“You ’ad a mos’ terrible crack on d’ead, bahss. A strong-back glanc’ offen your ’ead, an’ I harl you board dis raff.”
At the time of this dialogue, the speaker is identified by Philip in his narration only as “the Negro.” Soon enough, of course, he introduces himself as Timothy. Timothy obviously has black skin: he is a native islander hailing from St. Thomas and he is a representative of another time-honored—well, maybe not so much honored—literary tradition: the wise old black man. Less a fully developed character than Philip, Timothy is more a symbolic incarnation, but it is worth noting that he is also less a stereotype per se than an archetype.
As to whether or not Timothy is to be deemed an example of a creation by author endowed with certain racist elements, that is probably best left to each reader. But those with a propensity to immediately dismiss the book and especially the portrayal of Timothy as racist in nature would do well to considered all aspects of his character within context. This is not to suggest a viewpoint one way or another, but merely to indicate that it seems much easier at times to simply toss an opinion around than it is to engage in fully-functional critical analysis. Nevertheless, the dialect of Timothy’s discourse is bound to make the book difficult reading for some simply on the basis of translation.
I said to Timothy, “I want to be your friend.”
He said softly, “Young bahss, you ’ave always been my friend.”
I said, “Can you call me Phillip instead of young boss?”
“Phill-eep,” he said warmly.
A case can be made that this is the centerpiece of the narrative. In fact, one of those making this case is none other than the narrator himself. Philip immediately prefaces his recording of this short conversation by asserting that “Something happened to me that day on the cay. I’m not quite sure what it was even now, but I had begun to change.” That, in a nutshell, kind of serves as a rudimentary summary of the entire story. If one is given to distillation of plots down to their barest elements, then it is entirely appropriate to say that The Cay is a book about the changes that take place in a sheltered young white boy upon being stranded on a small deserted island with an old black man. Of course, it is worth mentioning that this exchange takes place at roughly the midpoint of the story, so there is still enough time left for Philip to fill in the missing gaps and become much surer of exactly what was happening to him.
