Black Shack Alley

Black Shack Alley is a semiautobiographical Caribbean novel that explores shifting race relations in early twentieth-century colonial Martinique. It features a foreword by the Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau.

This Penguin Classic follows in the tradition of Richard Wright's Black Boy, as Joseph Zobel's 1950 novel chronicles the coming-of-age of Jose, a young boy dealing with issues of power and identity in colonial Martinique. As Jose transitions from childhood to young adulthood and moves from rural plantations to urban Fort-de-France in search of upward mobility, he witnesses and struggles against the various manifestations of white supremacy, both subtle and overt, that will alter the course of his life.

His ally in this struggle is his grandmother, M'man Tine, who battles her own weariness to release at least one child from the plantation village, which is a dirt street lined with the shacks of sugarcane workers. Zobel's masterpiece, the basis for the award-winning film Sugar Cane Alley directed by Euzhan Palcy, offers a powerful testament to twentieth-century life in Martinique.