Margaret Bruce Clarke - "Hunter's Marjory"

David Graham Phillips - "The Plum Tree"

George Otto Trevelyan - "Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay"

George Oliver Smith - "Highways in Hiding"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Seventh Noon

F >> Frederick Orin Bartlett >> The Seventh Noon




"Ben," she began, "I had no right to allow Peter Donaldson to go away
as I did."

"Little sister," he demanded, "was he unkind to you?"

"No. No," she broke in eagerly, "he was most generous with me. But
for the moment I could n't see it. It was my fault that he went."

"But what was the cause of it?" he insisted, puzzled and dazed by the
whole episode.

"It was nothing that counts now. I want you to promise me, Ben, that
you will never refer to it, that you will never permit him to tell you
of it."

His face cleared.

"Just a little tiff? But he took it hard. I never saw a man so worked
up over anything."

"It belongs to the past," she hurried on, eager to allow it to pass as
he interpreted it. "It would be cruel to him to bring it up again.
Will you promise me, Ben?"

"I will promise. But I 'm afraid you overdid it. It is going to be
hard to straighten him out."

"No. It is all straightened out now. All that remains for you to do
is to find him and say that I--that I wish him to come back for lunch."

"Is it that simple?"

He smiled, his easy-going nature glad to seize upon anything that
promised relief from such a jumble as this.

"You must say nothing more than that," she put in, frightened at the
sound of her own words. Supposing that he would not come--supposing
that even now she had presumed too far?

"You will tell him just that?"

"Yes," he agreed, "and this morning I would have thought that it was
enough."

"It is enough now--whatever happens," she said hastily.

"I must hurry back to Marie," she concluded breathlessly. "You must
not delay. It may be that he is planning to leave town. If so, you
must catch him before he starts."

He placed his arm tenderly about her slight waist and led her to the
foot of the stairs.

"You will let me know as soon as you come in?" she pleaded.

"Yes, and don't worry while I 'm gone."

Arsdale did not take a cab. He needed a walk to clear his head. The
air was balmy with the fragrance of growing things and he was sensitive
to its influence as he had never been in his life. As he strode along
he felt twice his normal size. And yet what a puppet he was as
compared to this Donaldson who had been willing to take upon his
shoulders the ghastly burden which had been his own. He himself might
bear it to-day, but yesterday it would have crushed him. He had not
realized how low he had sunk until he learned that it was considered a
possibility that he might have committed such crimes as those. If at
first the suspicion had roused his wrath, the sober truth that Jacques
under the same influence was actually guilty had been enough to disarm
him. The past was like a nightmare, and this Donaldson was the man who
had found his hand in the dark and roused him. He quickened his pace.
A small black dog nosing about the fresh dirt thrown from an excavation
to his left attracted his attention to a new house which was going up.
He glanced at the men at work and then stood still in his tracks. Down
there, in his shirt sleeves, bent over a shovel was Peter Donaldson.

It was impossible to believe, but he stared at the illusion with his
hands getting cold. Then he turned back to the dog. It was the same
pup Donaldson had brought into the house with him.

He riveted his eyes once more upon the figure standing out among his
fellow workers like a uniformed general in a rabble. He strode to the
side of the foreman of the gang who stood near.

"Who is that man down there?" he demanded.

"Dunno," the foreman answered briefly, "he asked fer work this mornin'
and I give him a job."

"I 'm going to speak to him."

"Fire erway."

Arsdale clambered into the hole and reached Donaldson's side before the
latter glanced up. When he did raise his head, it was with an easy,
unembarrassed nod of recognition.

"Good Lord," gasped Arsdale, "it _is_ you!"

"Yes."

Donaldson wiped his wet brow. He was not in particularly good training
for such heavy work.

"But what the deuce--"

"I needed money for a night's lodging and took the first job that
offered," he explained.

There was nothing melodramatic in his speech or attitude. He was not
posing. He spoke of his necessity in the matter-of-fact way in which
he had accepted it. It was necessary to earn the sheer essentials of
life, in order to get a footing--to get sufficient capital to open up
his office again. He would not have borrowed if he could, and a
penniless lawyer in New York is in as bad a position as a penniless
tramp. Not only was he glad of this opportunity to earn a couple of
dollars, but he found pleasure, in spite of the physical strain, in
this most elemental of employments. There was something in the act of
forcing his shovel into the earth that brought him comfort in the
thought that he was beginning in the cleanest of all clean ways. He
was earning his first dollar like a pioneer. He was earning it by the
literal sweat of his brow.

He turned back from Arsdale's astonished expression to his task.

"See here, Donaldson," protested the latter excitedly, "this is absurd!
You must quit this. I 've money enough--"

"And I have n't," interrupted Donaldson heaving a shovel full of moist
dirt into the waiting dump cart.

Even Arsdale was checked by the expression he caught in Donaldson's
eyes. He ventured nothing further, but, bewildered, stood there, dumb
a moment, before he remembered his message.

"I came out to find you," he managed to speak. "Elaine wants you to
come back to lunch."

"What?"

Donaldson paused in his work and searched Arsdale's face.

"What did you say?" he demanded slowly.

"Elaine wants you to come back for lunch. She sent me to find you."

Arsdale saw Donaldson's lungs expand. He saw every vein in his face
throb with new life. He saw him grow before his eyes to the capacity
of two men. He saw him step forth from this aching begrimed shell into
a new physique as vibrant with fresh strength as a young mountaineer.
It was as startling a metamorphosis as though the man had been touched
with a magician's wand.

"Thank you," answered Donaldson on a deep intake of breath. "I shall
be glad to come."

"Drop your shovel then and come along now."

"No," he replied, as he dug his spade deep into the soil, "I can't quit
my job. The whistle blows at noon."

At noon! At the seventh noon, the whistle was to blow! He tossed the
weight of two ordinary shovelfuls of gravel into the cart as lightly as
a child tosses a bean bag.

[Illustration: _At noon! At the seventh noon, the whistle was to
blow!_]

Perceiving the uselessness of further argument Arsdale climbed out to
the bank, and, sitting on a big boulder, watched Donaldson with dazed
fascination. The foreman passed him once.

"May be cracked," he remarked, "but I 'd' take a hundred men, the likes
of him."

"You could n't find them on two continents," answered Arsdale.

The dog made overtures of friendship and he took him on his knee.

Donaldson never glanced up. With the precision of a machine he bent
over his shovel, lifted, and threw without pause. The men near him
looked askance at such unceasing labor.

In time, the foreman blew a shrill note on a whistle and as though he
had applied a brake connected with every man, the shovels dropped and
the motley gang scrambled for their dinner pails. Donaldson for the
first time then lifted his face to Arsdale. The seventh noon had come,
and never had a midday been ushered in to such a sweet note as the
foreman had blown on his penny whistle.

Donaldson, picking up his coat, made his way to the side of Arsdale,
who had risen to meet him with Sandy barking at his heels.

"I have only an hour," apologized Donaldson, "I 'm afraid I 'm hardly
in a condition to go into the house."

"You are n't coming back here?"

"Yes."

Once again Arsdale found his protest choked at his lips. What was the
use of talking to a man in such a stubborn mood as this? He led the
way to the house.

In the hall, he shouted up the stairs,

"Elaine, Peter Donaldson is here!"

The girl stepped from the library clutching the silken curtains. She
hesitated a moment at sight of him and then faltering forward, offered
her hand.

"I 'm glad you came back," she said.

His fingers closed over her own with a decisiveness that made her catch
her breath. As the woman in the mirror had divined, there was nothing
more left for her to do.

"But the old chump is going again in an hour," choked Arsdale, "he 's
taken a job shovelling dirt."

She met Donaldson's eyes. For a moment they questioned him. Then her
own eyes grew moist and she smiled. The joy of it all was too much for
her. She stooped and patted Sandy who was clawing her skirts for
recognition.

"Oh, little dog," she whispered in his silken ear, "I am glad you came
back. Glad--glad--glad!"




THE END

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