One Brown Girl and 1/4 (1909) is a novel by Thomas MacDermot.
Published under his pseudonym Tom Redcam by the All Jamaica Library,
One Brown Girl and 1/4 is a tragic story of race and class set in
Jamaica. Understated and ironic, the novel critiques the social
conditions of Jamaica under British colonialism. Through the character
of Liberta Passley, a wealthy woman of mixed racial heritage, MacDermot
sheds light on the disparities between the island's black and white
communities, crafting a story now recognized as essential to modern
Caribbean literature. "'I?' said Liberta Passley, 'am the most unhappy
woman in Kingston.' She was not speaking aloud, but was silently
building up with unspoken words a tabernacle for her thoughts. She
considered now the very positive assertion in which she had housed this
thought, went again through its very brief and enigmatic terms, and then
deliberately added the further words: 'and in Jamaica.'" Despite her
beauty, wealth, education, and social standing, Liberta Passley is
unable to feel satisfied. Raised as the only surviving daughter of a
wealthy Englishman and his formerly-enslaved wife, Liberta feels she
must ignore her mother's side of the family as a means of rejecting her
African roots. Manipulating her father, she arranges for her Aunt
Henrietta, her mother's only surviving sister and their loyal
housekeeper, to be fired and thrown out. Thinking she is making a
decision for her own good, she unwittingly welcomes disaster into her
life. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset
manuscript, this edition of Thomas MacDermot's One Brown Girl and 1/4
is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.
