It is 1981 and Daphne is 12 years old when the proverbial stranger comes to town, the opening incident of Lisa Smith’s standout debut novel, “Jamaica Road.” One of the only Black girls in her South London comprehensive school, trying her best to achieve invisibility, Daphne is appalled when her teacher assigns her to be the new boy’s helper “because you’re both Jamaican.”
Daphne’s protest — “But I was born here” — is ignored, and the tallest 12-year-old she’s ever seen slides into the seat next to her. This is Connie Small, whose role in her life is perhaps foreshadowed when he is asked to be next to read aloud from … “Pride and Prejudice.” Hello, Mr. Darcy.
Daphne listens closely as “Connie pronounced every word with precision, a foreigner speaking the Queen’s English. Yet rather than sounding clipped and robotic, the syllables lengthened and were smoothed by the lilt of his accent. I’d only ever heard grown-ups speak with a Jamaican accent, never someone my own age.”
Code-switching among the local South London regional accent, the Queen’s English, and Jamaican patois is one of the complexities of the immigrant experience Smith brilliantly portrays. As Daphne overcomes her initial resistance to friendship with Connie and the two begin to spend time together, he asks her, “D’you suppose one day mi will begin to sound cockney like you and all dem other pickney ah school?”
She corrects him, explaining that she only talks like the white kids “when I have to,” as her grandmother insists on “proper English.”
“Grandma doesn’t like us speaking Jamaican either, she reckons that it gives prejudiced people the chance to say we don’t belong here. She says, ‘You English. You nar fi talck like we.’”
Connie is greatly amused. “That is the worst Jamaican accent mi ever hear.”
As the novel follows the pair over a 12-year period, with sections set in 1981, 1985, 1989, and 1993, this issue of how one speaks is mostly highly charged when addressing police officers, which happens with nerve-wracking frequency. The novel opens just after a real incident that occurred at a house party, the New Cross Fire, where arson took the lives of 13 Black youths. As Smith explains in an author’s note at the end of the book, she hadn’t set out to chronicle racial violence during the period, but as she researched it, she realized that the ongoing attacks and murders of black teens throughout the period would have had a big effect on her characters, as much a part of their lives as all the music and musicians she includes by name, and the food she mouthwateringly describes.
In addition to its important role as recent historical fiction, “Jamaica Road” is both a love story and a family drama. When the story opens, Daphne is living with her mother, Alma, a nurse, and her grandmother Miss Gladys (the one who insists on proper English), as well as an aunt, an uncle, and four cousins in a ramshackle cottage long slated for demolition. Daphne has never known anything about her father, but she will ultimately learn that she is one of many children of a man called Eeze — exactly how many, no one can say. She tracks him down and forms a fraught relationship with him over her mother’s objections. Alma’s disappointments and trials have made her an unhappy woman. She has high hopes for her daughter, but not a lot of softness. Fortunately, Miss Gladys is a reliable font of kindess and wisdom.
Connie’s mother, Althea, is a gifted hairdresser. She and Connie are in England illegally (they “nuh land,” an expression Daphne learns early in the friendship) but the plan is that Althea will marry Tobias, who is the father of Connie’s baby brother Kallai, as soon as his divorce comes through. But Tobias is a violent and cruel man. Domestic abuse is a key element of the plot, connecting Smith’s first novel to other recent UK debuts — “The Names,” by Florence Knapp; “Nesting,” by Roisin O’Donnell, and, on our side of the pond, the work of Colleen Hoover. Here the ongoing violence against and harassment of Black men is a complicating factor, leading to a pivotal moment in the book, and a period of alienation between Connie and Daphne.
In this situation and others, the novel resists final judgments and easy answers, recalling F. Scott Fitzgerald’s marker of a “first-rate intelligence” — the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind, to “be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
In Smith’s universe, this dilemma is summarized by a quote that comes up again and again, attributed to Connie’s embattled mother. Though Althea is arguably the character with the least agency, she has instilled in her son the belief passed on to her by her Jamaican father that “We run tings, tings nuh run we.” Connie first brings this idea up to Daphne when he’s trying to convince her to track down her father. But the decisions the characters make to take control of their fates are just as often completely thwarted by conditions and circumstances. If the end of “Jamaica Road” is marred by too much happening in too short a space — a hell of a lot of drama and tragedy at the very last minute — it is a profound demonstration of the fact that sometimes, tings very much do run we.
JAMAICA ROAD
By Lisa Smith
Knopf, 448 pages, $29
Marion Winik hosts the NPR podcast “The Weekly Reader.” She is the author of “The Big Book of the Dead.”