This short story is mostly concerned about the interactions between the 3 characters of Mamitz, Celestine, and Irene. All 3 seem to be on the low end of social hierarchy as they live in "barrack-yards" in which "...the porters, the prostitutes, the cartermen, washerwomen, and domestic servants of the city" lived.
C. L. R. James presents their place, the women in the barrack-yards, by explaining something about Mamitz.
"Niether the accusation nor the beating had worried Mamitz. To her and her type those were minor incidents of existence, from their knowledge of life and men, the kept women's inevitable fate..."
Women lived in this society that C. L. R. James has depicted yet he says that this fate is inevitable. Meaning that in the same society, women are oppressed. Women are others and this quote does a great job at depicting this. The women in the story, Mamitz, Celestine, and Irene, are using men to live, to survive, because this inequality already made it sufficiently difficult to achieve otherwise.
"It's the wo'se when you meddle with them common low-island people, said Celestine..."
The character of Nicholas had been lied to by Mamitz, Celestine, and other characters in the yard of whom thought lowly of him because he was from St. Vincent. In the end, because of his love for a women that was using him to get his money, Mamitz achieves her goal of getting that money. Nicholas didn't know who to trust. Should he believe Irene, the outcast in the barrack-yard, or the rest of the yard. All in all, C. L. R. James was trying to show that even though the women were considered others in their own society, there were still others in that same society. Nicholas being from St. Vincent, made his place in that society even lower. Even though Nicholas had a job and had money, he was still considered lower than the people of the barrack-yards.
Even in a society of others, there are still others.
I think this story is about these three woman to show how woman and power were connected back then. While Irene seems to be the most powerful of the three she ends up being the 'other' within' the three of the woman. In the story it says "But Irene was a jealous woman,not only jealous of Mamitz's steady three dollars a week and Celestine's policeman with his twenty-eitht dollars at the end of the month." She was jealous of the lifestyle of the two and tried to over power them with attitude and ends up slipping lower.
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