A Place in the Sun

A BRIGHTER SUN (215 pp.)--Samuel Selvon--Viking ($3).

The first time Tiger got a look at his wife was when they were getting married. As the ceremonial sheet was thrown over them, he raised her veil to sneak a glimpse and saw a teen-ager with "black, sad eyes, long hair, undeveloped breasts." Tiger was only 16 himself.

"What you name?"

"Urmilla."

It was a conventional marriage because this was Trinidad. Like their parents, who had arranged the deal, the young marrieds could neither read nor write. Now they were going to the distant town of Barataria near Port-of-Spain, the capital, to start life on their own with Urmilla's dowry: a cow, a thatched hut and garden, 200 Trinidad dollars. The neighborhood kids were there to see them off.

"Tiger! So yuh married now!"

"Yuh is a big man now, boy!"

A Brighter Sun is the first novel of young (28) Trinidadian Samuel Selvon, who left his island to work for a British publisher. Its pages are flecked with Caribbean color and sunshine, but Tiger's personal story is neither colorful nor sunny. He and Urmilla were desperately poor and abysmally ignorant. In Barataria they slept on sacking on the floor of their leaky hut, sold their milk and vegetables in the slum neighborhood where they lived, and tried to behave like grownups. For Tiger, that meant working his tiny patch of land, getting drunk now & then on rum bought on credit at the store of Tall Boy, the Chinaman, and occasionally beating up Urmilla. For Urmilla it meant doing the primitive housework, delivering the milk, worshiping Tiger, and having babies. Everything might have gone well enough in picturesque squalor if Tiger hadn't begun to think about things, and if the war hadn't brought the Yankee dollar.

Tiger went to work on a new road for the U.S. Army for more money than he'd ever seen before. He got started on a new brick house to replace the hut, made Ur-milla buy her first shoes and a new dress, invited his Army bosses to a rum-washed dinner. But he had taught himself to read, and now thoughts clouded his expanding horizons. What was life all about? Could he ever break away from his dreary existence? Could a colored ma~n ever get a break in a white man's world? He daydreamed about getting an education and becoming a great lawyer. He would go to England or the U.S. But unlike Author Selvon, Tiger doesn't get away. At story's end, with the G.I.s and the big pay envelope gone, he is getting ready to plant corn.

What makes A Brighter Sun shine more steadily than most current fiction is a freshness of speech and locale that is as welcome as its direct, unsurprised look at life. Author Selvon still has a way to go as a craftsman in fiction, but his native lingo rings true, and the native squalor and insular ignorance have been triple-distilled and mixed with his ink. At the very least, he knows what poor Tiger learned the hard way: "You don't start over things in life; you just have to go on from where you stop."

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