“We Is We” in Lauren Francis-Sharma’s Book of the Little Axe

Lauren Francis-Sharma’s Book of the Little Axe is an epic that interweaves the story of the Rendóns, a free Black family in Trinidad who navigate the colony’s transition from Spanish to British rule, and the ensuing journey of daughter Rosa, who, seeing no future for herself in the island, travels to North America and becomes kin with an Apsáalooke (Crow) community. The novel is especially remarkable for its hemispheric frame, which juxtaposes the enclosures of British Trinidad and post–Louisiana Purchase North America; for its centering on Black and Indigenous families; and for its attention to Black environmental stewardship.

Francis-Sharma’s detailed attention to early nineteenth-century Trinidad is unusual in Caribbean literature. Unlike V. S. Naipaul’s The Loss of El Dorado (1969), which devotes many pages to Governor Thomas Picton’s trial after he ordered the torture of Louisa Calderón, Francis-Sharma’s novel tells a story not of colonial victimhood but rather of a Black woman’s will to survive. Moreover, Book of the Little Axe features elements of a postcolonial story: it is peppered with references to Trinidadian food, legends, and calypso. Cultural touchstones, such as sorrel drink, tamarind balls, and Papa Bois, as well as sayings like “What’s sweet in the goat’s mouth will be sour in his bamsee,” give readers the impression that the social and cultural practices that sustained Trinidadian peoples amounted to sovereignty long before the nation transitioned to independence in 1962 (92).

Protagonist Rosa Rendón is the daughter of Myra Robespierre, a free woman of color from Martinique, and Demas Rendón, a man born to emancipated parents hailing from one of the oldest African lineages in Spanish Trinidad. Myra had arrived in 1783 with her family. Demas, on the other hand, had grown up in St. Joseph, the capital of Spanish Trinidad before it moved to Port of Spain. Upon meeting in 1784, Myra and Demas entered into a partnership and carved out an existence together, resulting in the purchase of seventy-five acres where they grew cacao, bred horses, and built a home within view of Port of Spain. Rosa’s two siblings, Jeremias and Eve, do not feature as prominently in the story, although Jeremias’s entanglement in a forced marriage to his cousin prefigures the misfortune that befalls the Rendón family.

That wedding takes place in February 1797 and therefore coincides with British takeover of the island. Francis-Sharma illustrates how British rule meant uncertainty, precarity, and diminished possibilities for French free people of color and Black families like the Rendóns. Historically, roughly ten thousand enslaved Africans were trafficked into the colony between British conquest and Spanish cession in 1802, such that the bonded population doubled within those five years. Details in the novel, including Demas’s attempt to plant silver-thatched palms around his property as British rule solidified, stand in for residents’ attempts to remain as autonomous as possible despite economic and political transitions.

British colonial records from the 1820s contain some testimony of French free people of color in Trinidad, particularly of those elites who resided in the southern Naparimas. Their petitions clearly reveal that British governance eroded their rights, and many scholars have argued that Trinidad was granted crown colony status precisely to minimize their influence. Yet much less is known about the varied trajectories of their less affluent counterparts, particularly those who resided in and around Port of Spain. Book of the Little Axe offers a vivid and complicated portrait of their possible lived experiences during this volatile era.

Furthermore, histories of early nineteenth-century Trinidad typically suggest that French arrivants after 1783 were either royalists or revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the story of the Rendóns offers another path of response to the transitions fostered by the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century insurrections and British rule: the desire to be left alone. Importantly, this choice, as Francis-Sharma demonstrates, is not borne of ignorance. In fact, the Rendóns are deeply aware of their history: the arrival of the British sparks Demas’s recitation of historical antecedents, such as the island’s early conquest by the Spanish and their dispossession and enslavement of Indigenous Taínos.

As the novel advances, its chapters alternate between the story of the Rendón family and that of an outside character who is written as a bridge figure for Rosa’s journey from Trinidad to North America. Creadon Rampley, the mixed-race son of a Native American mother and an English guide for the Hudson Bay Company, helps Rosa travel from Trinidad to North America. Rosa and Creadon develop mutual respect and build what Francis-Sharma describes as a “reluctant alliance” over many years (351). They also live together in Oregon Country on a farmstead outpost, where they have a child called Victor. Victor’s young adult quest from his Apsáalooke community to the place where he was born, with his mother as chaperone, constitutes a dominant strand of the plot that transpires over the 1830s.

Book of the Little Axe is deeply concerned with family, both inherited and chosen. The novel also captures wider notions of belonging that are rooted in commitment to the land and to other people, in part by adapting calypsonian Mighty Chalkdust’s 1972 song “We Is We” at two key moments during the story. In the first, Demas uses the phrase to assert his right to be Trinidadian despite the havoc wrought by British control. In the second, which closes the novel, Creadon explains to his son Victor that they must ride back to rejoin the Apsáalooke community, despite not being related by blood. In short, the novel’s concluding passage emphasizes that Caribbean peoples have long found and made kin wherever they have resided throughout the hemisphere.

Catherine R. Peters is an interdisciplinary historian of overlapping empires, Black and Asian diasporas, and the environment in the nineteenth-century Caribbean.