In Between Is Brown

IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN (313 pp.)--George Lamming--McGraw-Hill ($3.75).

Life in Creighton village on the British island of Barbados was primitive, but no one. least of all a boy. could call it dull. There were playmates with such names as Trumper. Po King and Boy Blue. There was an occasional flood that carried away the shacks of the natives. There was the great blue sea to swim in, the teachers at school ever ready to cane the inattentive, the vigorous back-fence give & take between parents and neighbors.

George Lamming. half-Negro, half-white poet, is only 26, but he has come a long way from his Barbados village. After teaching on the neighboring island of Trinidad for four years, he went to England, worked first in factories, wound up as a BBC reviewer of films and books. His own first book. In the Castle of My Skin, is a curious mixture of autobiography and a poetic evocation of a native life that has changed in the author's brief lifetime from careless, laughing simplicity to uneasy social awareness. In spite of patches of fuzzy overwriting, it is one of the few authentically rich and constantly readable books produced by a West Indian.

For Donkey's Years. Young George got the lowdown on marriage quite early. People did get married, of course, but it wasn't really necessary. Bambi, for example, lived a very good life indeed until a fanatical, strait-laced white lady persuaded him to marry one of his women. Until then, as Boy Blue related: "He wus livin' with Bots an' Bambina both all two at the same time, for a long, long time. An' they all had children for him. Bots had Puss in Boots Number Two an' Suck Me Toe, an' Bambina had three. Sugar Shine, Turtle Dove, an' Stumps. An' Bots an' Bambina wus the best of friends, an' the children who wus half brother an' half sister live like real brother and sister without any talk 'bout half or quarter. They live real splendid together, an' so did they mothers ... in the same sort of feelin' of you belong to me an' I belong to you. An' it went on like that for donkey's years."

The overriding fact of color was always there. Lamming remembers his pal Boy Blue explaining: "Just as I wus goin' to born the light went out." And Lamming himself testifies: "No black boy wanted to be white, but it was also true that no black boy liked the idea of being black. Brown skin was a satisfactory compromise . . . The best-looking girls in the village were those whose mothers had consorted with white men . . . One was known throughout the island-as the crystal sugar cake."

Milk an' Honey. Author'Lamming was a bright boy at school, went on to high school and a teaching job. Others of his generation went to the U.S., the new land of "milk an' honey flowin' as it use to flow in the ancient time." Young George saw native agitators engineer strikes against the British landowners, saw native villagers dispossessed of patches of land that had been home all their lives, then saw the agitators sell out the native black folk who had been bemused by revolutionary talk that was over their heads.

In the Castle of My Skin should make instructive reading for colonial administrators. Author Lamming remembers how things were, can still reproduce faithfully the political confusion of the islanders, as well as he can record the quarreling speech of a village strumpet: "I could give your story to the worl'. but people who is people don't do that sort o' thing. You ain't people. Baby Parker. You foot never touch shoe nor you head hat. You ain't people. I say."

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