The Black God

THE HILLS OF HEBRON (315 pp.) -Sylvia Wynfer -Simon Moses Barton strides into Cockpit Centre wearing a blue turban, white robe, and carrying a shepherd's staff. He announces to the startled Jamaican Negroes that he has come as a messenger of God "to break the neck of cowardice and slavery" and lead them out of bondage.

Prophet Moses has a lamentable weakness for nubile girls, and his first mission fails when he tries to ascend to heaven from the top of a breadfruit tree. Instead he falls to earth, breaks his leg, and is carted off to the insane asylum.

Freed after five years, Prophet Moses returns to Cockpit Centre with a new revelation: God is black. Moses leads his followers up into the hills to build the Utopian settlement of Hebron with their bare hands. But down in Cockpit Centre, the mockers who always ridiculed Moses are now rapturously following a Marxist messiah who preaches revolution and easily defeats Moses in a marketplace debate. The prophet determines to make amends for his philandering and vainglory as God's son should: through crucifixion.

While his followers pray mightily in Hebron church, Moses hangs from a cross on the hill above. After two nights of agony, he dies with the dawn. His despairing last words: "God is white after all ... God is white!" This thickly peopled first novel, an arresting blend of hurt and humor, peasant piety and patriotic gore, goes far beyond the common run of Caribbean books. Author Sylvia Wynter, 34, was born in Cuba of Jamaican parents, educated in Jamaica, Britain and Spain, now lives with her husband, Novelist Jan (Black Midas) Carew, in British Guiana. Author Wynter complements the simple faith of her Jamaicans with their equally deep cynicism: they resignedly expect that everything -from religion to Marxist atheism -will let them down eventually.

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