Literature / Going Home to Teach

Based on actual events.

Going Home to Teach is an autobiographical novel by Jamaican author Anthony Winkler, published in 1995.

Winkler outlines his time spent as an instructor at a teacher-training college in Jamaica in 1975, during the tenure of then-Prime Minister Michael Manley, and discusses the history behind black-on-white and white-on-black racism in Jamaica. He also flashes back to his own boyhood experiences, the struggles endured by himself and his family (individually and as a collective group), and the anti-white sentiment he faced while growing up.

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Tropes present in Going Home to Teach:

• Abusive Parents:
  • In one instance, while Winkler has his neighbors visiting, from a distant yard they hear the sounds of relentless flogging of a screaming and sobbing child for half an hour. Just the sound of what’s happening is enough to disgust Winkler.
  Winkler: I couldn’t help wondering about that child. Twenty years from now with a gun in his hand and a victim impaled in its sights, what mercy would he show when his own pitiful pleas and grovelling had provoked only insensate anger and further blows?
  • Winkler also recounts how his maternal grandfather was this, mercilessly beating the White Sheep of the family because she refused to enter an Arranged Marriage.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • While some of the other tutors ream Winkler for pulling his "pretend to choke" stunt after eating a few baked pastries served in the staff-room, at a time when Jamaica is in the midst of panic over imported flour that's been poisoned, a few can't help but chuckle at his prank.
  • Winkler recounts how he was in a shop looking to buy lunch, when two darker-skinned men in the waiting queue start arguing over which of them is the lighter-skinned one. When they turn to Winkler to ask his opinion, he, not wanting to get involved, sputters some German (and Chinese) to make them think he's a foreigner who doesn't speak English...but when he gets to the front of the line, forgetting his deception, he orders his lunch in plain English. The two men glare at him—then both burst out laughing at Winkler's guile.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Winkler's peers during his childhood, and later the other members of staff at Longstreet (at first), because he's white.
• Arranged Marriage: Nearly all of Winkler's female relatives on his mother's side were subjected to this by his maternal grandfather, oftentimes to much older men, because the grandfather wasn't about to let any of his daughters marry black men. The women wound up being abused or neglected by their husbands.
• Ass Shove: Winkler's paternal grandfather used to shove a finger into his hens' rectums every morning. It was his way of determining whether any of them were preparing to lay eggs.
• Ax-Crazy: At least one of Winkler’s maternal aunts turned out this way, as a result of constant beatings from her husband.
• Berserk Button: Corporal punishment by teachers triggers this in Winkler, due to his own bad experiences with an anti-white racist teacher during his high school days.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Winkler.
• Big Fancy House: Mrs. Mendoza, the head of Longstreet College's math department, has one.
• Broken Bird: Many of Winkler’s female relatives on his mother’s side of the family qualify, with one exception.
• But Not Too Black: White is revered/hated, brown is respected/loathed depending on the lightness or darkness of the color, and black is looked down upon by all others.
• Butt-Monkey: Several of Winkler's female relatives during his childhood, some being in abusive marriages and other succumbing to madness borne of unsatisfied sexual passions.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Winkler does this to Dr. Levy in a moment of Unstoppable Rage.
• Culture Clash: A recurring issue throughout the story. In one example, his paternal grandmother, knowing her husband had a wandering eye, hired a black maid with a stout body and large buttocks in the hope that these traits would repulse Grandfather; however, Winkler's narrative notes that in doing so, she—an American by birth—completely misinterpreted what Jamaican men tend to find attractive, as Grandfather found the maid irresistible and had multiple liaisons with her, oftentimes right under Grandmother's nose.
• A Day in the Limelight: Winkler devotes a few chapters to talking about his wife Cathy, his paternal grandparents, his maternal relatives, and his fellow teachers.
• Deadpan Snarker: Winkler himself.
• Depraved Bisexual: Winkler describes one of his American college professors as being this, depending on the time period. For example, during the rise of Women’s Lib, she took only female lovers; during the Black Panthers’ uprising, she took only black lovers.
• The Determinator: Mavis, one of the students tutored by Winkler.
• Dirty Old Man: Mavis accuses Dr. Levy of being this. It's hinted that he is.
• Double Standard: Winkler’s maternal relatives were largely guilty of this, sheltering the females while allowing the males to run amok.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: One of Winkler's maternal aunts, the only one to refuse to enter into an Arranged Marriage, got a savage No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from her father for defying his expectations, then got scandalized by the rest of the family after divorcing her first husband for his alcoholism (with her father triumphantly holding her "bad choice" over her head). She would eventually meet her second husband, have two children with him, and be Happily Married for the next fifty years.
• Evil Matriarch: Winkler’s paternal grandmother, and especially more so after his grandfather died. Winkler remarks that it’s because of resentment at never being able to go back to her native America and hating Jamaica.
• A Father to His Men: Dr. Levy, Longstreet College’s principal, presents himself this way.
• Feuding Families: Evidently, Winkler’s paternal and maternal relatives had this vibe going on between them.
• The Fundamentalist: Longstreet College’s vice-principal. He and Winkler feud with each other because of it.
• Happily Married: Tony and Cathy, of course.
• Insane Troll Logic: On one occasion, Winkler goes to supervise a teacher-in-training who reveals to him that the principal of her school is denying lunch to a young boy because he doesn't have the money to pay for the subsidized government school-feeding program. When confronted, the principal goes on a rant about how the boy is obviously using the money to buy sweets rather than pay for lunch like he's supposed to, so he needs to be taught a lesson. When Winkler suggests that the boy might not in fact have the money at all, and that his parents may be too poor to provide it for him, the principal stares at him as if she's unable to comprehend such a simple explanation, then explodes into another rant that the boy does have the money and that people like his parents would rather cheat the government and starve than pay what they owe.
• Jerkass: Winkler’s fellow teachers Raymond Hunt and Mrs. Mendoza are guilty of this, the former for being anti-white, the latter because of Greed. Winkler himself is guilty of this as well; in one instance in the story, when Jamaica is in the grip of panic over poisoned imported flour, he gets assurance from the school cook that Longstreet’s flour supply is safe, then goes back to the staff-room and promptly eats two pastries, waits until the other tutors get busy eating, then immediately pretends to choke. Cue Spit Take and Oh, Crap! expressions from all the others before Winkler delivers the punch-line.
  Winkler: Damn it! I forgot I’m giving a test to 4B this morning!
• Karma Houdini: Dr. Levy.
• Kids Are Cruel: A lot of kids treated Winkler cruelly during his childhood, because he was white and they were black.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Winkler’s maternal grandfather was this toward his daughters, insisting that they should marry husbands he chose for them, and determined that none of them would marry any black suitor. His sons, on the other hand, were allowed to sleep with their black employees without repercussion.
• Manly Tears: Winkler, following his Unstoppable Rage.
• Moving the Goalposts: In recounting how he and Cathy got married in Jamaica, Winkler says that they had to deal with a marriage officer who kept stonewalling them because he (the officer) thought they should get marriage counselling first despite their declarations that they didn't want or need it. On their first visit, the officer said he couldn't wed them that day because he had to officiate at another function; then they had to get all their previous marriage documents on hand; then they had to bring witnesses; and then when they brought the witnesses, Winkler's two sisters, they were told that there had to be at least one male and one female witness. The rigmarole finally ended when the official's wife browbeat him for imposing his university-based beliefs about marriage counselling on these innocent people.
  Wife: Is counselling you want? You want counselling? Go marry di people dem or I goin' give you some counselling you never forget!
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: During their childhood, Winkler and his brother persuaded their paternal grandfather to come play cricket with them. Some time later, he died from complications rising from a heart attack. Winkler’s grandmother blamed them harshly for it.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Winkler claims he saw the ghost of his father several days after the man’s death, and that the man's voice was heard without him opening his mouth.
  Winkler: The odd thing was that his lips did not move. Yet I distinctly heard him say, "Take care of your mother."
• Real Life Writes the Plot: The whole point of the book.
• The Resenter: Winkler himself admits to feeling this way toward Mrs. Mendoza due to her earning far more money than he does despite them being in the exact same profession.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: The house rented by the Winklers during the author’s tenure at Longstreet has these. He describes one in particular as being “fat and sleek as a squirrel.”
• Sadist Teacher: In one chapter, Winkler recounts his experience with a particularly nasty one of these, his Spanish teacher, during his first year in high school. The teacher caned him every Friday for the entire year, even over some very minor mistakes Winkler made in class, and would even scrounge around for excuses to cane him—at one point caning him because he stammered on one answer despite getting all the answers right. This was made worse by the fact that Spanish was not one of Winkler's better subjects, plus the fact that at that time, both teachers and parents saw caning as a necessary step for a high school boy's development. Winkler eventually theorized that the teacher, a black man who was of a lower socioeconomic class compared to Winkler's family at the time, was in fact taking out his racial and class prejudice on the then-defenseless young boy.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • In one instance, Winkler recalls how one of his maternal aunts, a sex-starved woman, brought a black lover in to slake her passions. The man was quite enthusiastic to the point of boastfulness at first, but as the evening wore on he became less and less so, eventually fleeing the house despite the woman's angry insistence that he come back and satisfy her.
  Man: (leaving) No white woman not going kill me in here tonight!
  • At the end of the novel, a representative at the Ministry of Education discovers that they've been paying Mrs. Mendoza, the richest teacher at Longstreet, on the wrong pay-scale for several years, and they cut her salary to what Winkler describes as a "missionary pittance." Mrs. Mendoza's response is to immediately resign, sell her mansion to another tutor, and leave Jamaica.
  • Winkler himself quits Longstreet and leaves Jamaica in a rage after finding out that two of the college's most promising students have just been stonewalled from sitting external exams on the very day they're to sit the first exam, despite earlier promises that Longstreet's mandated exam schedule won't clash with those external exams.
• Serious Business: Marrying someone of one’s own color during 1970s Jamaica, apparently.
• Shout-Out: Winkler makes mention of his first novel, The Painted Canoe, which he was writing at the time of the autobiography’s events.
• Sleeping with the Boss: Winkler recalls how his maternal uncles, all shopkeepers, often slept with their female employees.
• Take That!: Winkler takes a pointed dig at the often-held notion that teachers caning their students is necessary for the students to learn their lessons.
• Too Dumb to Live: Winkler's maternal grandfather was a racist with a bad habit of describing black people as "monkeys without tails," especially while living in Jamaica, a country with a very significant black populace. He once shot off that insult to a black policeman's face...and the cop responded by slamming his billy-club into the grandfather's gut, dropping him right there and then.
• True Companions: The teaching staff at Longstreet.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Dr. Levy.
• Well Done Daughter Girl: Cathy's mother. She militantly refused to wish Cathy good luck or kiss her goodbye when Cathy went off with Winkler, due to them living together outside of wedlock, and later refused to entertain a visit from Cathy unless the two were properly married.

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