Boundaries Read Online Free

for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which they knew something about, the ministry had no way of evaluating whether degrees from American universities measure up to the quality of a British education. She asked him about Howard. The prime minister of the island had graduated from that university in Washington, D.C.
    “Howard is an exception,” he said. He was aware of the history of segregation in America. “You can’t blame black students if they won’t let them into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Howard is the Harvard for black Americans.” He handed back her diploma.
    For seven months, Anna searched in vain for a job. The response of the headmasters and headmistresses from the schools was the same. An American degree, if it was not from one of the universities that belonged to the Ivy League, was not acceptable to them. In despair, Anna turned to her father for help. In two days, he arranged an offer for her from the headmaster of a junior secondary school, the third tier of an educational system that determined the fate of children by age twelve. There would be those who would make their living with their brains and those with their brawn. The children in the school where Anna was assigned were the latter. They were to be prepared for occupations in trades. For the boys: construction, cabinetry, plumbing, electrical repair. For the girls: sewing, cooking, domestic affairs that would make them good housewives and mothers. For girls unlikely to marry: secretarial education, typing, and filing. But everyone had to learn to read and write English (England was the Mother Country, after all), and so there was a place in the school for Anna. Her salary could not be the same as that of someone with a degree from a British university. If Anna wanted the job, she had to accept less money.
    When by chance Anna bumped into Alice, who was on holiday on the island, she was ready to leave. She had a vague plan of going to graduate school, nothing more than that, when she applied for a green card for permanent residence in the U.S. What she felt then was an emptiness, a sense of her life going nowhere, of being stuck in a rut, teaching children who had already accepted the fate decreed to them when they failed to make the passing grade on the eleven-plus exam. Already marked, they saw no purpose in reading books or learning to write beyond what was necessary to be a good cook, a good seamstress, a cabinetmaker, a construction worker. Anna wanted more for them and for herself, but there wasn’t more for any of them in a system that was confident it had found the answer to the problem of children who threw spitballs in class.
    Finding it difficult, if not impossible, to feel at home in America, Anna tried one more time after graduate school, baffling her mother who could not understand why she would want to come back now that she had a green card, the passport to the country where the streets were paved with gold. So seductive was the myth that many middleclass women on the island willingly humbled themselves to work in the kitchens of rich white Americans in the hopes of being sponsored. It took Anna just weeks to realize there was no place for her on the island. Her father cringed when she quoted Frantz Fanon to him, when she said that colonialism worked because the British had succeeded in colonizing minds—but the truth was, there were teaching jobs for expatriates from England and Canada, very few for local black women, and none again for her.
    The standard explanation was that the island was in a transitional phase and needed foreign professionals to replace the British officials who had left. But the University College of the West Indies, an arm of the University of London, had long been established in Jamaica. By the time it gained independent status in 1962 as the University of the West Indies, not the “College of,” there were many qualified locals able and ready to replace the British. But the British and Canadian