Is there a reason you don't often describe race in characters? when reading Anansi boys I had this weird conception of the characters of Charlie and Spider as white, when on future reads having context it was obvious they should not be.
I actually describe race a lot in Anansi Boys. You know who comes from where, after all, how they talk, what kind of foods they eat. But I only tend to tag the skin colour of the white characters in the book when they first show up.
"Excuse me,“ said a small white woman with a clipboard, “are these people with you?”
He was a middle-aged white manwith receding very fair hair. If you happened to see Grahame Coatsand immediately found yourself thinking of an albino ferret in anexpensive suit, you would not be the first.
They went inside: down woodensteps to a cellar where rubicund barristers drank side by side withpallid money market fund managers.
Grahame Coats had goneoff-white – one of those colours that turn up in paint catalogueswith names like Parchment or Magnolia. He said, “How did you getaccess to those accounts?”
Her flatmate, Carol, athin-faced white woman from Preston, stuck her head around thebedroom door. She was towelling her hair vigorously.
She wore a white blouse, and ablue denim skirt, and over it, a grey coat. She had very long legsand extremely pale skin, and hair which remained, with only minimalchemical assistance, quite as blonde as it had been when MorrisLivingstone had married her, twenty years earlier.
Fat Charlie squeezed in nextto a large woman with a chicken on her lap. Behind them two whitegirls chattered about the parties they had attended the previousnight and the shortcomings of the temporary boyfriends they hadaccumulated during their holiday.
(Those from a quick flip-through, and far from exhaustive.)
I hope people find on a careful reading that the race of the various characters is pretty obvious, and is often described (for example, Daisy’s father is from Hong Kong, her mother is Ethiopian).
I’m sorry you read Fat Charlie and Spider and Mr Nancy and their families as white on first read, but that might have something to do with the way that people’s heads reading a book can default all characters to white, if other information is not immediately supplied, which is a very bad habit, and one I hope Anansi Boys might help people to shed.
And there is, after all, a huge pointer to the race of the title characters in the title…
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