Title: Dawn at Lover's Leap
Author: Horane Smith
Publishers: Publish America
Reviewed by: Mel Cooke

A legend is very hard to follow, as tons of Jamaican singers after Bob Marley have found out.

At least the singers had the option of creating totally original compositions, so the comparison is strictly in terms of the quality of what is produced and measuring up to a legend.

This is not so with Horane Smith, who is trying to follow up his own retelling of the legend of Lover's Leap in St. Elizabeth with Dawn at Lover's Leap. Comparisons with the original tale, with its striking story of slave lovers leaping to their deaths rather than be split apart and the woman endure the not so tender attentions of a white man, are inevitable.

And Dawn at Lover's Leap comes up way, way short.

Smith's take on the original is clear from the beginning, as the white Anita looks out over Lover's Leap, cries and is comforted by her mulatto son Andrew. Leonora, a recent arrival from England who came in late on the tale, gets a synopsis just past mid-way in the 202-page book, through barrister Peter Bradley's explanation:

"To make a long story short, Anita was in love with a slave. The slave, in turn, was in love with another slave. When the secret affair came out into the light, all hell broke loose. Their love couldn't remain a secret forever. The slaves eventually jumped from the cliff, rather than live without each other."

So a few years past emancipation Andrew, the son of the dead slave Jerome, and Anita, daughter of the largest landowner in Yardley Chase, St. Elizabeth, are living in Jack's Place, the home of her father Alfred and mother Lynda.

Some suspension of belief is required in fiction, even historical fiction, but it requires too much for me to believe that the child of a slave and a white woman would be allowed to live with his grandparents, even if they do not really speak to him. It is hard to believe that "Andrew was treated like any other white person on the plantation because he happened to be kin; he spoke and acted like he was white."

This is a situation where white men typically ignored their bastards.

Then there is Smith's approach of sometimes simply stating the finer points of the tale, much as Bradley's explanation to Leonora, which pops up too often. There is the outlining of conditions just after emancipation ("Former slaves toiled in the cane fields daily, with the hope of earning something to live on. It was no easy task. Some of them wondered what emancipation was all about. Life was a brute, despite the fact that they were no longer the property of a slave owner. The shackles of slavery haunted them menacingly, both mentally and physically, brining dark clouds on their horizon".)

And there is the mother's new appreciation of her son's reasons for going into politics on a trip into Kingston ("The tone of the meetings all had one thing in common: to serve the people in building a new society, especially the underprivileged and the working poor. A new breed of young politicians, several mulattoes among them, was becoming a very vocal group in the House of Assembly.")

It is just before the journey into the city that Andrew muses on the whole point of Dawn at Lover's Leap, that "a battle was shaping up, a battle for his mother!"

Grammatical errors

As far as battles go it is very tame stuff, with no blood or other body fluid flying, although it involves the scheming overseer John, a long-time suitor of Anita. It involves a lot of riding around, a lot of conversation and a good dose of scheming, but nothing to send the blood racing, and certainly a poor comparison with the original tale.

Then, there are a few grammatical errors in this Publish America book which are simply inexcusable. The printer's devil almost always gets a stab in, but this is repeated juks. Like "Pastor McIntosh was a noticeable handsome man," and the observation "women are like weeds, they are happy one minute; by the next they whither away in sadness."

There is a reference to the period of apprenticeship from 1838 to 1840. That should be 1834-1838.

Smith dips into patois when Jerry and Simon, two labourers, speak and the trip into Kingston does serve the purpose of naming a parish, St. Dorothy, that has since been incorporated into another, and emphasises how hard it was to climb Spur Tree Hill in the horse and buggy days. But that does not serve as a sound basis for a book.