Word: sylvia
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...time she is teenage, Sylvia can read the faintest marks and signs of caste as ably as a jungle tracker can read a spoor. But Sylvia, secure in the shelter of her father's wing, enjoys sticking her neck out. It is tedious always to be "Russell's daughter"-to swap sophisticated chaff with Daddy and his "high-color" business friends, to go to the Town Hall with "people of good family, olive-complexioned, with Good Hair." So Sylvia frequents the frame house of her Indian girl friend Naomi, where a gang of fascinating outcasts has created...
...LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (316 pp.)-Edgar Mittelholzer-John...
...Sylvia Russell's complexion was pale olive and her eyes were limpid hazelgreen, but her hair was her crowning glory. It was what British Guiana called "Good Hair": it came flaxen straight from her immigrant cockney father and gave no hint, by frizz or kink, that Sylvia's mother was "a low-class girl" of "Buck" (Guiana Indian) and Negro parentage. Sylvia could not claim to belong to "the respectable middle class" of old and established colored families, but she was tony enough to attend the Georgetown academy of Miss Jenkins (a colored lady who passed for white...
...well-to-do engineer, regards Guiana's caste system with a mocking grin. The only Englishman in the book, he can afford to be tolerant, promiscuous, and amused by the battle of the pigments. "Goo-goo, my high-color belle," he cries, tossing his little daughter Sylvia to the ceiling. "Where do you come into the picture? What's your rating?" Ostracized in her bedroom, shiftless mother Russell sits interminably over her Singer sewing machine and gossips with her "dark" friends about the latest scandalous marriage, in words that read like a Guiana parody of Pride and Prejudice...
...from under his heroine. Father Russell is murdered. The jolly businessmen who laughed around his bridge table vanish into thin air-save for one who stays around long enough to pop the remains of Daddy's capital into his own pocket. By the end of the novel, Sylvia has sunk to a stratum from which death is the only escape, where crackers and condensed milk are deemed a nourishing meal and Good Hair is valued only because it is attractive to "dark" male customers...