Isabel Wilkerson’s book, Caste, turns the overhead light on in the ruins of the Big House 

Linda Brogan

 

July, 2022. Berlin. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I stare at a single photograph in its museum. Naked women. Why are they naked? Shot. Solders armed with rifles walk between them. Not many solders. Loads of dead women. One child. A son? A witness to these murders. The photo was found on an officer’s desk. A souvenir. A trophy.

Outside another Berlin memorial museum, Topography of Terror. Boiling. I have my umbrella up, like a parasol. I read every line. Is the Zeppelin real? I look for the tell-tale signs of manipulation in the photo.

Every second, every millisecond, what they are doing is precise. How would you think so far ahead? Know the next move? Do the last one? What justification do you give to talk your allies into this? Like married serial killers, Fred and Rose West, how do you propose your first murder? If your first was an accident or a necessity, how do you propose your second? Do you make a special dinner? Lay the table just right? 

Hitler’s first move is to build a balcony. He was always intending to be an orator. Thousands hysterically clamour to exalt him getting out of his car. The theatricality of it all. Hugo Boss uniforms. A raised arm. A raised leg. Such beauty in step. Such care. Such finesse. Such applause. Such wonderful work. 

Inside the Topography are illuminated messages on the floor. Last messages. Some state this is their last message. Calm. I imagine I would be insane with fear.

2024. In Origin, the 2023 biographical film based on Isabel Wilkerson’s writing of the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), the character of Isabel also walks between these messages. Watching the film, I am exhilarated that I have witnessed this, and walked there too.

2022. Even before reading Caste, standing in these Berlin museums, I can see the similarities between the treatment of the transatlantic slaves and the German Jews. But I always think of the master as too gluttonous, too dishevelled, lascivious, basking too much in wafting fans and glorious table settings to think as precisely as the Third Reich. I never give them credit for intention.

The Nazis hate the Jews. To the point that there needs to be a Final Solution. Of course there are links. Economics. Blacks’ free labour swells the master’s coffers. The Jews have all the dough, according to the Third Reich’s Chancellor. The Germans need that dough. The best way to get that dough is to vilify the Jews. Persuade people the Jews are less than human and have no right to that dough. Cut them from humanity. But there’s more than the economics. If you have a horse, mule, donkey, and you want to put it to work, get the most out of it, wouldn’t you feed it?

In the fields, it is a peck of corn. You can eat. And eat what you can grow in your strip of garden. My aunts’ 1974 Jamaican garden on Samuel’s Hill, passed down from the generation liberated in 1834, feeds them. They love my pale skin. They treat it with reverence. Ma’ Bas’ daughter. I elevate him through my mother, Miss Peggy, who hates black women. She knows in her bones they – he, them – are different from her, and that one day he will obey this and leave with one of his own.

Half-caste was just a description of me when I was growing up. An emblem in the 1970s Reno, a nightclub I went to. A badge of honour. Both sides hate us. We love each other. Not a mawkish love. Not in a loving way. In a survivor’s way. In the pageturners set on the fictional Falconhurst Plantation, we would have been left out on Samuel’s Hill to die. The brown child through the white lady’s legs. Miss Peggy and Ma’ Bas would have been lynched. Then lynched some more. Then boiled in oil. Then dismembered. His penis cut off. And kicked. And kicked across their beautiful, manicured lawn protected by oak tress draped in Spanish moss. Like Samuel’s Hill was draped in fireflies pretty as the mistress’s eyes considering the linen the half-caste sired by the master drapes on their table. 

Continents away to the East, still today, Dalits oil their brown skin to stop the shite they are submerged in, literally, from penetrating their skin, and making them ill. The shit they are shovelling so the Brahmin’s brown nose doesn’t have to smell it. Wilkerson makes me see that caste is not about colour or race. It’s about belief. So strong, so penetrating, so complete, it has travelled for 3,000 years inside the minds of those infected. Bound to their DNA. Labelled in their surname so neither group forgets. And cross infection is prevented.  

I couldn’t draw these connections in the Berlin sun that day in 2022. All I could see were the similarities. Looking at a 5 June 1934 photograph of high-ranking Nazi officers poring over Jim Crow laws to establish their own, my own bias wouldn’t allow me to see that the master’s transatlantic coercive control was also systematically crafted from the 3000-year-old Indian Hindu caste system of oppression. Isabel Wilkerson has imagined the correlation and then searched out the evidence, crystallised in this photo. 

How do you make everyone see it your way, build your entire culture, persuade an entire nation? It’s quite simple, really. It is simply bullying. You either benefit from what I have, or you suffer what they don’t have. Like the Fat Twat at the end of our street who made our friends – my friends – hate me every summer. Them summers I devoured my mum’s Falconhurst sagas.

2024. Now, as I read Caste, I realise it isn’t the Fat Twat who has to change, or the white supremacist, or the UK class system which lets me in only if I play the victim – it is me.  I have been demanding equal rights with, for and in my work. Not realising it’s irrelevant what they think of me. It is what I think of myself. 

Whether this would do me any good if I was scooping shit, or on a plantation, or on that last train ride… Probably not. 

Let me come at it from a different angle. Reading Isabel Wilkerson has made me realise I have a disease. The Fat Twat was half-caste. Only her dad was Ghanaian, and her mum was Cockney, two leading nations. My dad was Jamaican, my mum was Irish, two deeply traumatised nations. In my DNA is fear. I am infected with direct descendant of slave and colonised parent fear. Before I read Caste, I did not appreciate this.

Wilkerson makes her ‘Make-America-Great-Again’ plumber have empathy for her by having it for his dead mother. Caste left me with empathy for myself, towards myself. I was infected 65 years ago, when people spat in my pram. This action told me I am worth less. I have since believed I am worth less. Fuck-off. It is absolute nonsense. Why should one person shovel shit and another contemplate God? If the Brahmin understood God, they would understand the shame of what they are doing. If a white person was the real human, how could they spit in a baby’s pram? Both I and Wilkerson are trying to make these people see us as human. Instead of inherently knowing it ourselves. And being confident of that fact. 

Before she booked her flights to research Nazi racial supremacism in Germany and the Hindu caste system in India, Isabel Wilkerson must have had a plan. She has gifted me with a plan of my own: the final evolution of my Factory International immersive theatrical installation, In the Ruins of The Big House. 

Samuel, or Samuels, is a family name from the Berlin Plantation, St Elizabeth, Jamaica. Common practice was to give family names to the enslaved. My dad, Boswell Rudolph Samuels, was born in St Elizabeth in 1922, and is probably descended from people enslaved on the Berlin Plantation. 

As Wikipedia states: ‘Beginning in the Virginia royal colony in 1662, colonial governments incorporated the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem into the laws of slavery, ruling that children of enslaved mothers were born into slavery as chattel’. 

Living on my dad’s plantation, with my mum’s status, I am a member of the dominant caste whether they like it or not. I have the right to be a mistress. 

Setting the action inside the Berlin Plantation’s overgrown ruins, I will descend its sweeping stairs to greet my guests, at my table, to feast on my story in the arts, still, in my lived experience, firmly rooted in the ruins of the Big House. 

1. 2005, I can’t afford to buy dinner when my first play What’s in the Cat is on at the Royal Court Theatre. In the bar I want to throw over this blonde, white woman’s abundant table. I know her male guardians will beat me up. 
2. 2010. Speechless. ‘The end of the first week of rehearsal of what will turn out to be my last play.’ Saturday. I write an email to my white, middle-class director and co-writer suggesting she is asking the secondary, white characters what they think, but telling the primary, black characters what to think. Sunday. She’s hysterical. I’ve called her a racist. No. I just want a conversation for the good of the play. Monday. I am told do not talk in rehearsal; lunchtime, I can talk for 20 minutes when I have made sure she has eaten; and for 20 minutes at the end of the day. I reply, ‘This play is called Speechless. If you don’t unpack the play, you are making the historical twins, the actors playing them, and you are literally making me, speechless.’ 6pm. I am told not to come back to rehearsal or the police will remove me. I am sure if I was blonde, white and middle-class the last bit would never be added. Heartbroken, I lose my mind. 

 

1. 2015. Why I Want to Stab a Blonde White Woman in the Royal Court Bar.  I want to stage my 2005 imagined action on unsuspecting diners. Film it. Though she loves the title, the Royal Court’s artistic director advises me to look at how art had led me to this, given me the power to express it, how can I use the power of art to safely show what I mean. I hate her as I leave. 

 

1. 2016-20. Accidentally doing what the artistic director suggests, using the power of my art, I collect Reno memoirs from people who lived it. Excavate the club from its ruins. Exhibit our artefacts in the Whitworth Art Gallery – where I am gaslit over 18 months by its white, middle-class senior curator’s control of my budget. During a swordfight, I stab her to death with my public blog that spills all she is doing and did. 

I am testing the effects on my generational trauma of casting myself in a victor-not-victim light – including how I feel wearing a beautiful dress for my grand staircase entrance in the ruins of the big house. I would never have been able to think as precisely as this, with such intention, if I had never read Caste.