The story spans just a few hours on a Sunday night, when Mary summons the Sergeant to make a Statement. For all her present material comforts, Mary has never forgotten that riding-crop, and she has been readying her old hoe for her mission of retribution and sacrifice. Bellfeels’s “Outside-Woman,” Mary started out, like her mother, as a fieldhand, and her fate was decided one Sunday in a churchyard when Bellfeels noticed her ripening into puberty and felt her up and down with his riding-crop, the prelude to his raping her during a church picnic, just as he had once done to her mother. Mary-Mathilda is a middle-aged black woman who lives in a spacious house on the sugar plantation, where she was installed by the almost-white plantation manager Bellfeels, who lives nearby with his wife and daughters. The colony is the author’s own Barbados (here called Bimshire), and the period is post-WWII. More zeroes in, with laserlike intensity, on the interior life of an extraordinary "ordinary woman," showcasing Clarke's skill as a writer of inimitable force.The sexual exploitation of poor black women in the British Caribbean-in a rambling, plotless tale (winner of the Giller Prize) from Clarke, a veteran West Indian writer/academic/diplomat. Eventually Idora finds her way back into the light with a courage that is both remarkable and unforgettable.
As she summons the strength to investigate her son's troubles-and her own weaknesses-the book quietly builds to its crescendo. But now that BJ has disappeared into a life of crime, she recoils from his loss and is unable to get out of bed, burdened by feelings of invisibility. Left alone to raise her son, Idora has done her best to survive against immense odds. While she struggled to make ends meet, her deadbeat husband, Bertram, abandoned her for a better life in New York. For four days and nights she retreats into a vortex of memory, pain, and disappointment that becomes a riveting expose of her life as a Caribbean immigrant living abroad.
At the news of her son BJ's involvement in gang crime, Idora Morrison, a maid at the local university, collapses in her basement apartment.
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